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A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction.
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80P-; NCTE Teacher's Introduction Series.
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*English Instruction; Higher Education; Learning
Strategies; *Literary Criticism; Rhetoric; Secondary
Education; *Teaching Methods; *Theory Practice
Relationship; *Writing Instruction; Writing
Processes
*Deconstruction (Literature); de Man (Paul); *Derrida
(Jacques); Literary Theory
ABSTRACT
This monograph is designed to help English teachers
see what it is that the literary theory of deconstruction has to
offer them as they pursue their work. The monograph focuses on the
implications of deconstruction for the English classroom in American
schools. It includes a discussion of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of
reading and writing a review of some American critics' reactions to
deconstruction and responses made by English teachers to the theory;
and an examination of a deconstructive reading of writing pedagogy as
it underscores the appropriateness of much of the lore connected with
process pedagogy. The monograph also contains an appendix on "How to
Read Derrida," three pages of endnotes, a brief glossary of
deconstructionist terminology, a 70-item list of references, an
11-item list of Derrida works not cited in the text, a 38-item
bibliography of works on Derrida and deconstruction, and a 9-item
list of exemplary readings on deconstruction. (RAE)
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1.
A Teacher's Introduction to
Deconstruction
3
A Teacher's Introduction to
Deconstruction
Sharon Crowley
Northern Arizona University
NCTE Teacher's
Introduction Series
National Council of Teachers of English
1111 Kenyon Road, Urbana, Illinois 61801
I dedicate this book to the memory of my parents, teachers both: Dorothy Parriott
Conway and I. A. Conway.
NCTE Editorial Board: Donald R. Gallo, Richard Lloyd-Jones, Raymond j.
Rodrigues, Dorothy S. Strickland, Brooke Workman, Charles Suhor, ex officio.
Michael Spooner, ex officio
Staff Editor: Robert A. Heistcr
Cover Design: Michael J. Getz
Interior Design: Tom Kovacs for TGK Design
NCTE Stock Number 50144-3020
©1989 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
It is the policy of NCTE in its journals and other publications to provide a
forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching
of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point
of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board
of Directors, or he membership at large, except in announcements of policy,
where such endors:.ment is clearly specified.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crowley. Sharor., 1943 -
A teacher's introduction to deconstruction / Sharon Crowley.
p.
cm.
(NCTE teacher's introduction series)
Bibliography: p.
ISBN 0-8141-5014-4
1. English languageRhetoricStudy and teaching.
2. Deconstruction.
PE1404.C76
1. Title.
1989
808'.042'07dc19
89 -2887
CUP
5
Contents
vii
Foreword
Introduction
ix
xv
Preface
1 Reading/Writing Derrida
1
2 Deconstruction and the English Profession
19
3 Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
31
Appendix
49
Notes
51
Glossary
55
Bibliography
57
Author
65
v
6
Foreword
With the publication of A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction, we
begin what we hope will be a new series of books that are especially
useful to teachers of English and language arts at all levels. Ours is a
wide-ranging discipline, and important scholarly developments in
various aspects of our field can be highly complex, not to mention
voluminous. We often wish we had the time to take courses or do
extended personal reading in topics such as deconstruction, psycholinguistics, rhetorical theory, and the like. Realistically, each of us can
read intensively and extensively only in those areas that are of special
interest to us or that are most closely related to our work. The Teacher's
Introduction Series, then, is geared towards the intellectually curious
teacher who would like to get an initial, lucid glance into rich areas
of scholarship in our discipline.
Let me stress three things that are not intended in A Teacher's
Introduction to Deconstruction and in future books that will appear in
this series. First, the books are in no way shortcuts to in-depth
knowledge of any field. Rather, these straightforward treatments are
intended to provide introductions to major ideas in the field and to
whet the appetite for further reading. Hence, bibliographies and
suggestions for further reading are included. Second, the books do not
aim to "dumb down" complicated ideas, sanitizing them for an
imagined "average reader!' Many of the ideas are quite challenging,
and we don't seek to patronize the reader by watering them down.
Third, we don't want to send the message that every subject which is
important to English and language arts teachers should be taught
directly in the classroom. The personal enrichment of the teacher is
paramount here. An understanding of the complexities of deconstruction might or might not come to inform Monday morning activities;
but our primary goal is to provide stimulating texts for English teachers
at all levels and not necessarily to provide specific classroom applications. A great deal of misery might have been avoided in the 1960s
if teachers had been doubly urged to learn about grammars new and
oldthat's part of being a well-rounded teacherbut to avoid bringing
their new insights, tree diagrams and all, directly into the classroom.
vii
!ti
viii
Foreword
We are grateful to Sharon Crowley for taking on the formidable
work of writing the first book in the Teacher's Introduction Series,
especially since deconstruction is a topic that doesn't strike graceful
poses for explicators (perhaps appropriately, as Crowley points out).
In discussing development of the text with the author, I wrote "Knowing
your subject in its complexity, you'll need to play Coleridge and 'bring
the wonders down' without doing violence to the ideas as you simplify
them. This isn't quite the compositional equivalent of walking on
water, but it does involve some fancy footwork, and I think you're up
to it." As you read A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction, I think
you'll agree that Dr. Crowley was indeed up to the task.
Charles Suhor
Deputy Executive Director
NCTE
Introduction
One of the many paradoxes in the history of English c epartments has
been the unacknowledgedeven unperceivedinflu ?rice of literary
theory on the undergraduate and secondary teaching of English. It is
not difficult, for instance, to trace the assumptions of New Criticism
from their sources (for instance, Wellek's and Warren's Theory of
Literature and Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn) through literature classes
and into composition, as do James Berlin in Rhetoric and Reality: Writing
Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985 (1987, 14" -111) and, more
extensively, Colleen Aycock in her 1984 dissertati,m1 "New Critical
Rhetoric and Composition."
Every English teacher acts on the basis of thew y. Unless teaching
is a random series of lessons, drills, and readings chosen willy-nilly,
the English class is guided by theories of langi.age, literature, and
pedagogy. That is, insofar as teachers choose readings and plan
instruction, they are implementing a theory. The question, of course, is
whether or not teachers understand the the,.)ry that guides their
instruction. If we do not understand the theoretical context in which
we function, we are powerlessunable to rationalize what we do and
hence stripped of the ability to argue our case with administrators,
boards of education, governments, and special interest groups such
as, for example, those advocating or condemning bilingual education.
The current theoretical era in literary Mudies and composition/
rhetoric can fairly be called post-structure:list, the methods and assumptions of structuralism having run their course, superseded now
by other schools, notably reader-response criticism and deconstruction,
the latter a particularly radical and furiously complex body of doctrine
that has been extraordinarily influential in both literary studies and
composition/rhetoric.
I would like to stipulate that Romanticism and the New Criticism
set the stage for the reception of deconstruction, the subject of Sharon
Crowley's admirable and admirably concise guide for teachers. Whether
or not my historical argument will stand up is beside the point of this
introduction. What does matter is the guidance through an excruciatingly difficult body of theory that Professor Crowley provides.
ix
9
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
x
In bare essence, the project of deconstruction is to obliterate the
doctrine of presence in Western metaphysicsthat is, to deconstruct
the all-pervasive notion that behind the words is a truth that the
words express. (And if there were, how could that truth be expressed,
except in words?) Deconstruction, then, razes determinate meaning
and from the rubble constructs the indeterminate text, behind which
or within which there is no single, unvarying meaning.
If one dates the beginning of deconstruction in English departments
from the publication of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's translation of
Derrida's Of Grammatology in 1976, that movement has been around
for some thirteen years now, and its impact can be seen in, for example,
Hillis Miller's "Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and
the Teaching of Writing" (1983); Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature (1985), edited
by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson; and the witty, iconoclastic
Plato, Derrida, Writing (1988), by Jasper Neei.
As Crowley's bibliography demonstrates, the profession has responded to deconstructionist theory in typical fashion, with a plethora
of supplements, every text being an occasion for further textuality, ad
infinitum. The sources of this weighty lodefor example, Of Grammatologyare daunting in the specialized knowledge one needs to
understand them and in the barrier created by the coy rhetoric of
authors such as Derrida and his epigones. Most of us would be grateful
for assistance in getting the gist of a philosophical position that for at
least a decade has been central to discussions of literature and that,
by laws as inexorable as those of plate tectonics, will influence the
teaching of English for decades to come. Crowley's explanation of
deconstruction, in her first chapter, is reliable, balanced, and accessible
to readers with little background in the underlying epistemological
and linguistic issues.
After explaining the basic concepts of deconstruction in her first
chapter, Crowley develops an unexceptionable thesis in her second:
that prevailing literary theories powerfully influence English department teaching in both literature and composition, and that
Despite official announcements of their demise, deconstruction
and post-structuralism have affected the politics of American
departments of English in fundamental ways. In many colleges
and universities, literary theory has become a more respectable
teaching interest than it once was, and university teachers can
now be hired because they are "theorists" or "post-structuralists"
rather than "Miltonists" or "Chaucerians." And ... the new emphasis on literary theory is congenial, in many respects, with the
growth of interest in rhetoric and composition theory, fields whose
,
Introduction
xi
assumptions about language are sometimes compatible with those
made in post-structuralist thought.
The argument that has obviously been Crowley's real interest all
along is the substance of her third and final chapter: the implications
of deconstructionist theory for composition, namely, the problematization of traditional doctrines: authorial sovereignty and authority,
"th2 view that the writing process begins and ends with an individual
author"; "our easy separation of thought from language, content from
form, meaning from expression"; and the distinctions of genre that
have often structured composition courses and textbooks.
It is defensible (though hardly neat and incisive) to say that
composition theories and practices can be classed as text-centered,
author-centered, or transactional. The images are clear: that of pages
in an open book; that of a lone writer producing text; and that of a
writer on one side, a text in the middle, and a reader on the other
side. Crowley sets out to explain how deconstruction might contribute
to a necessary move from the "process" model to the "transactional."
A bit of history will help clarify both Crowley's argument and my
comments on it. In 1891 Harvard tightened up its admission standards
to exclude students who were deficient in writing ability, and in 1897,
the university reduced "general education" requirements to one course:
a year of freshman rhetoric. (Berlin 1984, 58-76 tells the whole story)
In beefing up standards, Harvard institutionalized current-traditional,
text-centered rhetoric, for the focus was on the mechanical correctness
and even the handwriting of essays completed by applicants for
admission. (Notice that Harvard validated composition as a university
course; therefore, Arkansas and California and South Dakota and Utah
had license to follow suit. Freshman composition became the universal
hurdle for students, the bane of literature faculties, and the life raft
for graduate programs in English.)
A whole synapse or syndrome of stirrings and forces brought about
the shift of focus to the author. Several rebels against current-traditionalism published lively, iconoclastic, and commercially successful
texts: Macrorie, Telling Writing; Elbow, Writing without Teachers; Coles,
Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process. Research into the com-
posing process began. In 1971, Janet Emig published her seminal
monograph The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders. By 1977, Flower
and Hayes were under way with their studies of composing, and in
that year Oxford published Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations. The
point is this: the composing process became an object of scholarly
inquiry. But perhaps most important, the Anglo-American Conference
(Dartmouth Conference) was held in 1966 and reported on in several
xii
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
volumes, the most influential of which is John Dixon's Growth through
English (1967), a little book that had enormous impact. At Dartmouth,
the Americans were advancing the "heritage" model (that is, the
Anglo-American canon of literature) and the "skills" model (for
example, grammar exercises). The British, however, won the day with
their "growth" model. Now, it is the case that the growth model was
salubrious; it moved some teachers away from mere "skills" and
opened up the canonaway from the red pencil and veneration of
Adam Bedebut it had within it a large component of solipsism: the
child using language to grow cognitively and emotionally and to
discover the world. The image is that of a student communing with
himself or herself. At the very least, we can say that the growth model
did not emphasize transaction. Yet rhetoricians old and new share a
transactional view of "writing" in the broadest sense of that word.
The greatest of the old rhetoricians said that rhetoric is the art of
finding the available means of persuasion in regard to any subject
whatever, and Kenneth Burke, the greatest of the new rhetoricians,
says, "You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language
by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying
your ways with his" (1969, 55).
"Deconstruction," Crowley says, "assumes the complicity of writers
and readers in all acts of composing. That is. readers of any discourse
become its writers as they reconstruct a 'meaning' for it.... A deconstructive pedagogy . .. would redirect the notion of intention or purpose
away from examination of a text onto its suitability to the rhetorical
situation for which it was designed." Compositionists who consider
themselves New Rhetoricians must at this point be heartened. Their
allies are a formidable trioAristotle, Kenneth Burke, and Jacques
Derridawho, while differing in important respects, support the
transactional model.
However, when we consider the tradition in which we English
teachers function, the future does not look so bright for those of us
who consider ourselves New Rhetoricians and hence transacttonalists,
for we understand that deconstruction could as easily serve as the
foundation for a revival or perpetuation of author-centeredness in
composition. Almost offhandedly in chapter two, Crowley remarks,
"Of course, a deconstructive pedagogy would locate invention within
the movement of language itself, rather than in the individual writer,
as much current composition theory does!" But locating invention in
the movement of language itself in effect does away with, or easily
can do away with, context (or "scene," as Kenneth Burke would say)
and audience. As cases in point, here are, first, Jacques Derrida,
Introduction
xiii
followed by Peter Elbow (the most inexorably author-centered of all
well-known compositionists):
It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the wr.-d,
that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where is
going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation
toward meaning that k constitutes and that is, primarily, its future.
(Derrida 1978, 18)
... think of writing as an organic, developmental process in
which you start writing at the very beginningbefore you know
your meaning at alland encourage your words gradually to
change and evolve. (Elbow 1973, 15)
As 1 conclude this introduction, 1 must confess that my reserved
tone has been a facade. The "Crowley" of whom I have spoken is,
actually, my good friend Sharon, many of whose most important
philosophical, scholarly, and personal values are mine also. I know
that Sharon belongs to what 1 have been calling the New Rhetoric
and that she is, therefore, a transactionalist. 1 know also that she is
skeptical about the possibility of changing those institutions within
which we English teachers must function: schools, colleges, universities;
a powerful, text-bound literary establishment; a tradition in which
composition is devalued. And 1 think that is why a tone of melancholy
pervades the last words in this admirable book: "Perhaps the best to
be hoped for is that a deconstructive critique demonstrates the necessity
of continued interrogation of the strategies used to teach reading and
writing. 1 can only hope that this essay has stimulated a few of its
readers to engage in such a critique :'
W. Ross Winterowd
University of Southern California
References
Atkins, G. Douglas, and Michael L. Johnson, eds. Writing and Reading
Differently: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985.
Aycock, Colleen. "New Critical Rhetoric and Composition." Dissertation.
University of Southern California, 1984.
Berlin, James A. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges
and Universities. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges,1900-1985.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Reynall and Hitchcock,
1947.
3
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
xiv
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1969.
Cokes, William E. Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process. Rochelle Park,
NJ.: Hayden, 1974.
Derrida, Jacques. "Force and Signif _ation." Writing and Difference. Translated
by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978: 3-30.
Dixon, John. Growth through English. New York: Oxford University Press for
the National Association for the Teaching of English, 1967.
Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.
Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. NCTE Research
Report No. 13. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1971.
Flower, Linda (SJ. "Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Solving Problems
in Writing?' College English 41 (1979): 19-37.
and John R. Hayes. A Process Model of Composing. Document Design
Project Technical Report No. 1. Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University
Press, 1979.
Macrorie, Ken. Telling Writing. Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1970.
Neel, Jasper. Plato, Derrida, Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1988.
Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic
Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York:
Harcourt, 1956.
14
Preface
When the editors of this series asked me to write the essay that
follows, they already had a title in mind for itit would be called "A
Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction." The piece was to be part of
a series of essays that would introduce teachers of English to new
developments in rhetorical and literary theory.
I must admit that I had some initial doubts about this project. I
worried that its title would imply, somehow that English teachers
required some sort of mediation --a gloss, an interpretationthat could
stand between them and the primary texts in which deconstructive
strategies are demonstrated and discussed. I also worried that the
editors wanted something like "Deconstruction Made Simple," a project
which would respect neither the complexity of the subject nor the
sophistication of its intended audience.
I finally decided, however, that the mandated title ought to mean
something like this: This essay will help English teachers to see what
it is that deconstruction has to offer them as they pursue their work."
Deconstruction is among other things, a theory of reading and writing.
And a writing teacher's work is theoretical, after all; a teacher's
assumptions about how language works and how best to teach its
workings guide every choice she makes, from the books she asks her
students to read to the exercises she asks them to complete. This
observation holds whether these assumptions are implicit or explicit
in her teaching. I hope that the essay which follows will demonstrate
the advantages for teaching of making any theory of reading and
writing explicit.
As I wrote this essay, then, I tried to focus on the implications of
deconstruction for the English classroom in American schools. What
happened as I wrote was not entirely what I expected. While I was
following up the implications of deconstruction for English teaching,
I found that 1 was also performing a deconstructive reading of some
traditional English pedagogies of reading and writing. This happened
(I think) because deconstructive notions call into question many of the
assumptions that are often made about the processes of native-language
reading and writing, and about how these processes are learned and
XV
15
xvi
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
taught. As a result of this work, then, 1 found myself deconstructing
what might be called the academic ideology that governs a good deal
of literacy instruction in American schools.
Since it is limited to unraveling the ramifications of deconstruction
for English teaching, there are a couple of things that this essay does
not do. First of all, its account of deconstruction focuses on those
aspects of deconstructive thought that have serious potential for altering
our thinking about reading and writing pedagogies. As a consequence,
it ignores hefty portions of the primary texts in which deconstruction
was introduced to American readers, especially those having to do
with the history of philosophy. Deconstruction is a fairly esoteric
strategy of reading, developed by a French philosophy teacher named
Jacques Derrida so that he could undertake a wide-ranging critique of
Western philosophy. Derrida thinks that traditional philosophy binds
and distorts our thinking about the relations between self-consciousness, thought, and language. Traditional thought about these matters
promotes a number of powerful and yet unspoken assumptions that
have blinded Westerners to the deceptive nature of speech and writing
and their role in human activities. The project called "deconstruction"
attempts to expose these assumptions for what they are.
Consequently, Derrida has concentrated much of his attention on
re-reading the major texts of Western philosophy, in an attempt to
expose the workings in them of what he calls "the metaphysics of
presence:' However, because his initial interests lay with the deconstruction of a strictly philosophical tradition, Derrida's readings of the
work of figures like Edmund Husserl, Immanuel Kant, and Sigmund
Freud are relevant to this essay only indirectly.
Second, although it provides an overview of some of Derrida's
thought, this essay is emphatically not an introduction to, or outline
of, the work of Jacques Derridaas though one could write a sort of
"Cliffs Notes" on Derrida and deconstruction. There are several
excellent books in print that are intended to introduce Derrida's work
to American readers. The most accessible of them are, in order, Jonathan
Culler's On Deconstruction (1982); Christopher Norris's Deconstruction:
Theory and Practice (1982); and Vincent Leitch's Deconstructive Criticism:
An Advanced Introduction (1983). But anybody who reads this essay,
or Culler's, or anyone else's, in the hope of skipping the work of
reading Derrida's texts will be cheated. Any summary of, or commentary on, Derrida's texts is necessarily reductive, or "supplementary"
as Derrida might say. Derrida's writing is notoriously difficult (there
are good reasons for this as I hope to establish). But it always repays
the close attention it demands from readers. Reading Derrida is a lot
16
Preface
xvii
like reading Ulysses or Finnegan Wake; it's tough at first, but once you
get the hang of it, you find it worth the effort. I hope, then, that
readers of this essay who have not yet acquainted themselves with
Derrida's work will want to do so. (An appendix to this essay suggests
some hints that may help readers who wish to begin reading Derrida.)
Third, although reading and writing are not so easily separated from
one another in deconstructive thought as they are in the structure of
English departments, I have concentrated on writing instruction in this
essay. Aside from a few remarks about traditional literary pedagogy
in chapter one, and about the practice of deconstructive criticism in
chapter two, I say relatively little about the practice of teaching
literature, a lack for which I apologize. Since I am not a teacher of
literature, I felt it would be inappropriate for me to make suggestions
about how literary pedagogy might incorporate deconstructive insights.
However, teachers of literature should not find it difficult to extrapolate
Derrida's thought for their own work. Further, the work of the "Yale
critics"Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Millerprovides
excellent models of deconstructive readings. Teachers of literature can
also resort to Gregory Ulmer's Applied Grammatology (1985) for an
account of a "post(e)-pedagogy" that takes Derrida's thought very
seriously. Two textbooks also utilize recent developments in literary
theory: Robert Scholes's, Nancy Comley's, and Gregory Ulmer's Text
Book (1988); and Kathleen McCormick's, Gary Waller's, and Linda
Flower's Reading Texts: Reading, Responding, Writing (1987).
Fourth, I am aware that on occasion my exposition of Derrida's
thought is difficult to read. Most of the difficulty, I hope, can be
assigned to the difficulty of the matters he is tackling, and not to my
own stylistic insufficiencies. However, I did adopt or adapt some of
Derrida's eccentric syntactic mannerisms, such as inversion or fragmentation, when I thought that these underscored or enhanced a
point. I apologize in advance to readers who are irritated by any of
my departures from convention.
A note about audience: I have assumed throughout this essay that
my readers are professional English teachers who know little or nothing
about Derrida and deconstruction. However, I also assumed that this
essay might attract a few informed readers, who can (and no doubt
will) raise objections to what ; Je said in the text. Many of the endnotes
are the result of an imaginary dialogue c carried on with these readers
while I wrote.
All works cited are listed in the bibliography, and are cited in the
text by date and page number (for example, "1985, 323"). I have
made two exceptions to this rule: Derrida's texts are cited by an
17
xviii
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
abbreviated title and page number (for example, 'WD, 124", which
means 'Writing and Difference, page 1241; and classical texts are cited
by standard manuscript line number (for example, "265e"). The
bibliography also lists some selected works about deconstruction as
well as a few exemplary works of deconstructive criticism.
As Derrida would have it, all the persons named in the next sentences
helped to write this essay. They were its readers, or they offered
stimulation, support, or counseling to its author. Special thanks to Tilly
Warnock, for whom teaching, theorizing, and friendship are commen-
surable practices. For their responses to, or arguments about, the
matters discussed here I thank Gary Eddy, Amy Gingrich, Victor
Vitanza, and my students in English 621. Ross Winterowd's disagree-
ment with me about the worth of post-structuralist thought has not
kept him from being a friend, advisor, and teller of instructive stories
about the English profession. Thanks to Michael Spooner, who talked
me into this. A portion of this manuscript will appear in PRE-TEXT
vol. 8, no. 3-4. Last of all, I thank Bryan Short, without whom.
Sharon Crowley
Northern Arizona University
IS
1 Reading/Writing Derrida
Jacques Derrida teaches philosophy at the Ecole Norma le Superieure
in Paris. His written works which concern us here were published
between 1967 and 1972, for the most part. They include two books,
Of Grammato logy (1967) and Dissemination (1972); two collections of
essays, Writing and Difference (1967), and Margins of Philosophy (1972);
as well as a collection of interviews, Positions (1972).
In the "presentation" or introduction to his thesis defence in 1980,
Derrida offered a brief history of the work he had carried out during
the 1960s, and which resulted in this collection of writings. During
this period, he said he had
tried to work out ... what was in no way meant to be a system
but rather a sort of strategic device, opening onto its own abyss,
an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ens..mble of
rules for reading, interpretation and writing." (Montefiore 1983, 40)
This "strategic device," this set of rules for reading, would be called
"deconstruction:"
The Metaphysics of Presence
Using this way of reading, Derrida detected a set of themes in the
history of philosophy and the human sciences that systematically
privileged the human speaking voice, and just as systematically devalued writing. As he put it, he detected
an evaluation of writing, or, to tell the truth, rather a devaluation
of writing whose insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive,
character was the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints.
These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of
denials, of dogmatic decrees ... I proposed to analyse the nonclosed and fissured system of these constraints under the name
of logocentrism in the form that it takes in Western philosophy
and under that of phonocentrism as it appears in the widest scope
of its dominion. (Montefiore 1983, 40)
Logos is a word from classical Greek that has meant, variously, "voice,"
"speech," "law," and, somewhat later, "reason:" "Logocentrism" and
1
19
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
2
"phonocentrism" are Derrida's nicknames for the foundational Western
philosophical assumption that conscious, integrated selvesspirits,
psyches, minds, subjectsare at the center of all human activity. This
assumption is "logocentric" because this "self" is tied to words; it is
"phonocentric," because the self is manifested in, or represented by,
the sounds made by a speaking voice.
Derrida names the set of constraints that permits this assumption
to function in Western philosophy "the metaphysics of presence:' Of
Grammatology, a very important work for understanding Derrida's
notions about writing, traces an early articulation of the metaphysics
of presence to Aristotle. This is not to say that Aristotle "originated"
the notions I'm about to describe; the origins of all such complex and
fundamental intellectual structures are probably undiscoverable. But
because we have access to certain texts that scholarly tradition ascribes
to someone named "Aristotle," and because the metaphysics of presence
is inscribed, or described, in these texts, Aristotle's name provides a
handy umbrella under which we can discuss this complex set of notions.
As an eloquent spokesperson for the metaphysics (..,f presence,
Aristotle conceived of language as both a representation of truth and
as an instrument for finding it. Language, whether spoken or written,
could serve these functions because it represents what all human
beings share in common: mind. Derrida quotes a passage from Aristotle's On Interpretation:
Just as all men have not the same writing sr: all men have not
the same speech sounds, but mental experiences, of which these
are the primary symbols (senteia protos), are the same for all, as
also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
(Book 1, 16a; OG, 11. Derrida's emphasis.)
Presumably, Aristotle generated this representational attitude toward
language simply because he, like all humans, possessed an "inner
voice"that voice (or consciousness, or memory) which assures each
of us of our self-identity, indeed, of our "self-present-ness." From this
assumption of self - presence, it was an easy step to infer a similar
presence, or being-here, of all that seems to exist in the world.
In the Grarnmatology, Derrida explains how the leap from voice to
self-presence to Being must have been made:
The voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of
essential and immediate proximity with the mind. Producer of
the first signifier, it is not just a simple signifier among others. It
signifies "mental experiences" which themselves reflect or minor
things by natural resemblance. (11)
20
Reading/Writing Derrida
3
That is, our voices (both inner and outer), as well as their continuity
throughout our lives, assure us that we do, indeed, exist as a conscious
entity having both a present and a past. And by a kind of doubling
movement, the relation of signification that exists between voice and
mind is transferred to the relation of minds to nature. In other words,
the metaphysics of presence assumes two sets of similar relations: as
minds represent or signify the substances of nature, so does language
represent or signify the "stuff" a minds, and through this, nature. I
quote Derrida again:
Between being and mind, things and feelings, there would be a
relation of translation or natural signification; between mind and
logos, a relation of conventional symbolization. (0G, 11)
Thus traditional metaphysics constructed a self-sealing argument regarding the representative relationships that exist between minds, the
world, and language.
Put in its simplest terms, the self-sealing argument goes something
like this: minds correctly perceive and experience the world because
they have a natural representative relation to it. Further, minds create
language, which must perforce represent nature, as well as the workings
of minds, since language is a mental production, and thus a product
of nature. The word "represent," as I use it here, should be read as a
pun: minds not only represent nature in the sense of signifying or
symbolizing it; they also quite literally "re-present" itmake it present
to us, give it to us again, perfect and undistorted. Minds "picture"
nature, if you will.
Aristotle's contemporaries built a grammar based on this double
relation between nature and minds, minds and language; Aristotle
himself erected a logic from them. In Greek, as in most other Western
languages, the simple sentence consists of two terms: a subjecta
something or somebodyand a predicate, most often predicating of
the subject that it is, that it exists. Assuming that this fundamental
grammatical structure somehow represents reality, the next step is to
derive a logic from it. Aristotelean logic is based on two concepts
borrowed directly from the grammar of the simple sentencecategories
and predicables, classes of things and the possible relations between
things. The basic assumption of this logic --the law of identity and
contradictionposits that either a thing is or it is not. Of course this
law presumed presence, and the entire logical system awarded privilege
to identity, rather than to contradiction. Thus, classical grammar and
logic conspired with metaphysics to create a neatly closed circle: reality
is enshrined in the structure of the languageit is represented in
21
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
4
"subjects" and "categories" that we manipulate by means of "predi-
cates"and language, especially when systematized into a logic,
becomes an instrument for re-presenting the world and the workings
of mind upon it.
Inscription and Signification
But Derrida wants to point out that both of these assumptions were
made possible, feasible, only because of the inner voice which speaks;
or better, because of the language that gives voice to voices. Derrida
might argue that traditional metaphysical thought about minds, world,
and language has it precisely backwards, or upside down, or inside
out. Consciousness does not precede, and give birth to, language;
rather, it is language that makes consciousness possible. From where
Derrida sits, it might be that signs themselves (or the process of
signifying) preceded minds, rather than the other way around.
But this trade-off, which rejects consciousness as the primary designation of human being, and puts the ability to signify in its place,
is not an entirely happy one. "From this perspective," as Robert Scholes
remarks, "human beings became human by receiving the gift of signs
at the cost of perceiving nothing but signs, everywhere" (1588, 251).
If this is the case, language itself, which is an infinite series of signs,
dictates that knowing and thinking are processes that are indistinguishably bound up with the movement of language. To write a bit
more poetically, language speaks us. Texts are everywhere. As J. Hillis
Miller puts it, perhaps a little recklessly, "language is not an instrument
or tool in man's hands, a submissive means of thinking. Language
rather thinks man and his 'world,' including poems, if he will allow
them to do so" (1977, 444).
Derrida has a term for language, when it is thought about in this
larger, compelling sense: he calls it "arche- writing" Arche-writing
names
all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal
or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order
of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also
pictorial, musical, sculptural "writing." (OG, 9)
Arche-writing is human in-scription on the world's surface, human
re-marking of the landscape. And this inscription, this remarking, is
thoroughly linguistic.
Derrida chooses "writing" to name this nearly unthinkable notion
partly because, in the metaphysics of presence, writing (in its more
22
Reading/Writing Derrida
5
literal sense) has always been devalued, secondarized. In the Grammatology, he continues his account of the founding gesture of metaphysics by recounting how this devaluation occurred:
The feelings of the mind, expressing things naturally, constitute
a sort of universal language which can then efface itself.... All
signifiers, and first and foremost the written signifier, are derivative
with regard to what would wed the voice indissolubly to the mind
or to the thought of the signified sense, indeed to the thing
itself.... the written signifier is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning. (0G, 11)
In order for the metaphysics of presence to get off the ground, its
inaugural movethe identification of voice with mindhad to be
forgotten; mind had to be privileged over language as the initiating
force of human consciousness. That is, mind was regarded as the
prime mover of human-ness, while language was demoted to a
secondary medium which could only re-present or mimic the movements of mind. The metaphysics of presence chose to forget that the
ability to signifythe ability which allowed the privileging of mind
in the first placewas precisely the province or function of language.
The mimetic function of language, its transparency, had to be
assumed in the metaphysics of presence; as Derrida puts it elsewhere
in the Grammatology: a "lived reduction of the opacity of the signifier"
is "the origin of what is called presence" (166). In other words, in
order to retain the myth of the primacy of mind, metaphysics has to
look through language, not at it. It has to assume that language is
transparent, rather than opaque. Further, it must assume that language
has no originary or creative powers of its own. On this model language,
especially written language, cannot generate or constitute meaning on
its own; it is only instrumental, forever dependent on some other
generative force for its motivation.
Thus a double-sided move constituted the fundamental power play
of Western metaphysics. The signified (presence, consciousness, self,
mind, reality, truth, reason) was elevated over the signifier (language
or any other sign system), which was reduced to a pliant medium of
representation. Once this move was made, thought became fundamental,
primary, and language became derivativerepresenting, mirroring, or
recreating thought. Likewise, metaphysics could become the "first science"first in both senses, primary and fundamentalbecause it could
ferret out essences which were uncontaminated by language.
In the metaphysics of presence, then, language is derivative of some
essence that precedes it, exerts authority over it. Derivative as it is,
however, spoken language has closer affinity to self-presence than
23
e)
A Teaclrer's Introduction to Deconstruction
6
does writing, which is itself derivative of speech. In the metaphysics
of presence, writing becomes, in effect, a representation of a representation. This attitude toward writing appears quite clearly in Plato's
Phaedrus, where writing is condemned as that which implants forgetfulness in learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;
they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of
themselves (275a). Writing is a container of a container, the outside
of an outside, a pale reflection of the voice which itself reflects
memorythat in-nate (interior and natural) voice which continually
tells us the story of our self-presence. Plato's was an important voice
in the instauration and maintenance of the metaphysics of presence;
thus he makes the textual Socrates complain that writing has no soul,
no motivation, no insides; written words may "seem to talk to you as
if they were intelligent," but actually "they go on telling you just the
same thing forever" (275e).
Throughout the Gramma° logy and other works, Derrida shows how
this set of doublings and metaphoric transferences, which privileges
mind and self over language, works itself out in the texts of Plato,
Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Freud, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger,
and J. L. Austin, among others. Ile dervmstrates that the metaphysics
of presence is a myth, a fiction, a linguistic constructaIthough it is
a construct that is crucial to the maintenance of Western thought, and
which is still inscribed in most of our assumptions about human
knowledge. Derrida's project, here as elsewhere, is to de-sediment the
metaphysical notions that inhere in and surround the important texts
of Western culture, to tease out and expose the strands of the metaphysical web from which most of the Western thought is suspended.
In other words, he de-constructs the fiction that is metaphysics.
Deconstructive readings of culturally important texts should not be
confused with more traditional analytic or critical readings. An analytic
reading of a text attempts to establish a meaning for it, to tell other
readers what the interpreter thinks the text "means:' But to read a
text deconstructively is not to produce a doubling commentary, one
that would reread the text in order to fix its meaning. Analytic readings
cannot escape the deconstructive insight that there is no "meaning:'
no "ultimate signified" that exists outside the text and to which the
text refers or tries to reconstruct. By way of example, Derrida shows
that the "characters" which populate Rousseau's Confessions are only
and necessarily functions of Rousseau's having written the text; that
"Rousseau" or Mamma or Theresa have interest and importance only
because of their inscription in Rousseau's text. To make the point in
24
Reading/Writing Derrida
7
Derrida's words: "in what one calls the real life of these existences
of flesh and bone,' beyond and behind what one believes can be
circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there has never been anything but
writing" (0G, 159).
A deconstructive reading does not try to aim or turn the text toward
some overarching system of meaning that would "make sense lf it,"
then. As Derrida remarks, such a reading
cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other
than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical,
psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text
whose content could take place, could have taken place outside
of language. (0G, 158)
Deconstructive readings do not try to he a text to some signified that
existed prior to and outside of the text (such as Rousseau's "intention"
in creating his characters). Rather, such a reading looks for places in
the text where a writer's language mis- speaks her, where she loses
control of her intention, where she says what she did not "mean" to
say. As Derrida puts it, the reading must always aim at a certain
relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands
and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that
he uses!'
Nor are deconstructive readings simply destructive. As Derrida's
translator, Barbara Johnson, would have it,
the deconstructive reading does not point out the flaws or weaknesses or stupidities of an author, but the necessity with which
what he does see is systematically related to what he does not
see. (Dis, xv)
More specifically, Johnson argues that, among other things, a deconstructive reading assumes:
(1) that the rhetoric of an assertion is not necessarily compatible
with its explicit meaning; (2) that this incompatibility can be read
as systematic and significant as such; (3) that an inquiry that
attempts to study an object by means of that very object is open
to certain analyzable aberrations (this pertains to virtually all
important investigations: the self analyzing itself, man studying
man, thought thinking about thought, language speaking about
language, etc.). (xvi)
Deconstruction exposes the dissemination of textual meaning beyond
what an author might have intended by trying to tease larger systemic
motifs out of gaps, aberrations, or inconsistencies in a given text. It
does this because it is aware that language, especially written language,
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
8
is reflexive rather than representative; it folds back in on itself in very
interesting and complex ways which produce meanings that proliferate
beyond an author's cons...ious control.
Let me supply an example of a deconstructive reading that readers
of this text can perform for themselves. I am aware, as I write, that
there must be blindnesses in my reading of Derrida's texts. These
blindnesses necessarily occur because of my own training, my reading
habits, my membership in an academic community, and a host of
other relationships of which I am only dimly aware. My training and
interest in rhetorical theory, for instance, have disposed me toward
texts, such as Derrida's, that suspend or question the validity of the
sorts of conclusions ordinarily drawn in philosophical discourse. No
doubt this disposition operates in such a way that I overlook, or
enhance, or diminish, some aspects of Derrida's thought. A deconstructive reading of this text would find those blind spots, and attempt
to account for them, not necessarily in terms of its author's biography
or ability, or even in terms c,.. the composing situation in which she
found herself. Rather, a deconstructive reading would address itself to
the blindnesses that are attendant on a given author's residence within
any number of cultural or institutional systems, such as the metaphysics
of presence or even the English profession.
In "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida describes deconstruction as a double movement, a writing with two hands, that attempts
to respect the terms of the conceptual system within which a text was
written at the same time as it calls those terills into question (WD,
226). Such a reading utilizes the images, structures, references, in a
text in a way that respects their inscription there; but it also interrogates
those bits of writing in order to see whether, like all language, they
also "do their own thing," so to speak. In Allegories of Reading (1979),
for example, Paul de Man performs a deconstruction of the figure called
"rhetorical question," using a text from a popular television series:
Asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes
laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with a question:
"What's the difference?" Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his
wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing
over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only
ire. "What's the difference" did not ask for difference but meant
instead "I don't give a damn what the difference is:' The same
grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually
exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference)
whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning.... It is not
so that there are simply two meanings, one literal and the other
figural, and that we have to decide which one of these meanings
26
Reading/Writing Derrida
9
is the right one in this particular situation. The confusion can only
be cleared up by the intervention of an extra-textual intention,
such as Archie Bunker putting his wife straight; but the very anger
he displays is indicative of more than impatience; it reveals his
despair when confronted with a structure of linguistic meaning
that he cannot control and that holds the discouraging prospect
of an infinity of similar future confusions. (9-10)
The confusion surrounding this small text of Archie Bunker's occurs
because Ms. Bunker mistakes the context in which Archie asked her
to read his remark. In de Man's deconstructive reading, however,
Archie has also stumbled onto the fact that a plenitude of meanings
resides in language. The implication is that even the reiterated contexts
that develop between two people who are married for a long time
will not suffice to eliminate the proliferation of meaning toward which
language strives. Most telling of all: Ms. Bunker's mistake becomes an
occasion for the invention of more discourse, this time about the
relative advantages of methods of lacing bowling shoes. As Archie
realizes, signifiers have the frustrating property of infinite regeneration.
In one sense, then, deconstruction amounts to reading texts in order
to rewrite them. But this rewriting has a different focus than traditional
critical reading: Derrida's project, in his early work at least, is to reread
Westein history in such a way as to give voice to that which has been
systematically silenced: that is, to arche-writing, the universal contam-
ination of pure thought by the workings of language. We might say
that he wants to expose a fraud, a fraud that has been perpetrated on
writing, both in its wider and more literal senses.
Differance and Knowing
Derrida has adopted an important strategy for doing this, which he
calls "differance." This word is a pun in French, combining the meanings
of "differing" (as any set of items lined up in space differ from one
another) and "deferring" (as in putting off, delaying). What if (Derrida
wonders), what if we assume that the basis of human knowledge does
not arise from self-identity, presence, sameness, but rather from difference, from absence? It is the otherness of listeners and readers that
gets us talking and writing, after all.
In order to understand how the notion of differance might undo the
notions of identity and sameness that underlie the metaphysics of
presence, it helps to think of some set of elements that exists in a
seriesthe letters of the alphabet, for example. Any member of the
seriesthe letter "t" for instancehas existence and meaning only
.27
10
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
insofar as it relates, differentially, to all the other members of the series,
such as "i" or "p". Likewise, the word to has meaning in English only
because it is a member of a sequence or chain of language, all of whose
members differ from it: words like so and two and on and on. We can
assign meaning to each term only because we see or hear that its letters
or sounds differ from those of its companion; each has meaning only
because it belongs to a system of differentiated relationships.
Now, what if this model of differance, as exemplified here in the
movement of language, dictates the movement of all human knowl-
edge? That is, what if it is possible to know anything at all only
because our knowledge of it differs from our knowledge of other
things to which it is related by its context? If we begin to think along
these lines, we see that knowledge is both dynamic and contextual.
We see, as Vincent Leitch puts it, that "in the realm of knowledge,
everything is constituted during a certain time by one or more people.
Some 'things` are included, some are excluded, some are marginalized.
Boundaries are set up" (1985, 22-23). That ic., what a given culture
"knows" at a given time is thoroughly historical, even fictitious, in
the sense that it is inscribed, written, by and within the culture. Further,
this knowledge changes over space and time; its edges change to
indude new knowledge; what was marginalized becomes central;
relations between parts of its internal structure are redefined.
This means, for one thing, that learning is a dynamic process that
has no discentible beginning or end. What a culture, or an individual,
"knows" at any given moment is available only because its configurations differ from, and yet depend on, what preceded it. This realization points up the futility of establishing spatial or temporal limits
or borders around acts of knowing, such as those assumed by labels
like "arts and sciences" or "Speech and English" or "theoretical and
applied linguistics."
For another thing, a differential model of knowing points up the
inter-textual or interreiational aspects of knowing. By tray of example:
the accidents of one's own life are an important part of the contexts
of learning. I could not, would not, have read Derrida but for the
accidents of my having had an undergraduate interest in philosophy,
a consuming interest in rhetoric, and a friend who spent a year (1977)
studying at Yale during the height of excitement there about Derrida's
work and who insisted upon his return that I read the Grammatology
with him. Further, this reading necessarily affected any other reading
I undertake: once I read Derrida, I can never again read the writing
of other authors (say, Aristotle) in quite the same fashion.' And when
I re-read Derrida (or re-write him, as I am doing here) in an attempt
28
Reading/Writing Derrida
11
to understand him "better," it is necessarily true that I only understand
him differently.
Additionally, on a differential model of knowing, knowledge is
necessarily contextualized: that is, no object of perception can be
altogether known when it is studied in isolation from the system that
gives it its meaning, from other objects that are both related to it and
differ from it, both in space and time. This contextual aspect of inquiry
poses a problem with which writers of history are all too familiar:
where does one begin, and end, when writing a history of, say. the
American Civil War? With the firing of the first shot? With secession?
With the institution of slavery? And where does one end? At Appomattox? With Lincoln's assassination? With Reconstruction? And what
should the history includewhere do its boundaries or margins lie?
Within American affairs? Or should the putative interference of other
nations also be studied? Should an account of the current cultural
scenejournalistic, literary, rhetoricalbe included? In short, the
dream that objects or events can be isolated from their contexts, that
lines or borders can be drawn around them, is another metaphysical
fiction.
But the most radical result of tolerating the notion of difference is
that it undermines the metaphysical hope of finding what Derrida
calls a "transcendental signified." The metaphysics of presence has
tried to ignore or halt the movement of difference, to find a stable
place to stand outside, or above it, to survey mental and physical
landscapes from the vantage point of some solid and non-temporal
footing. A variety of candidates for this transcendental footing have
been put forw-ird in Western culture: Plato's Ideas, the Judeo-Christian
God, empirical reality, the phenomenologists' Subject, Chomsky's deep
structures. Metaphysicians want, in short, to establish a signified, a
meaning, an essence, that somehow stands outside of the movement
of differencesurmounts it, transcends it, conquers it. Empiricists, for
example, posit that the evidence given us by our sensationstouch,
sight, taste, and the restis a pure and entirely trustworthy source of
information about the world. Thus they trace the source of meaning,
ultimately, to neurological events that they take to be foundational.
Straw Binaries2
I have already alluded to the fundamental opposition that entered into
the inaugural gesture of metaphysics: inside/outside. Insidesmind,
soul, memoryare always preferred to outsideshere the body-
29
12
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
which are somehow fallen, secondary. If we subscribe to the foundational fiction of metaphysics, that minds re-present the world, we
also require a series of similar hierarchical oppositions, in which two
concepts are unequally pitted against one another, as a way of
acknowledging, and yet denying, the movement of differance. For
instance: it used to be a commonplace in Catholic theology that Satan's
function is to help us to know God, his opposite and superior; we
cannot know the good unless we become acquainted with evil. Again,
we can discriminate speech from writing only because we have both;
their differences from one another help us to understand each more
fully. When, however, we privilege one over the other, as the metaphysics of presence privileges the spoken voice over the written text,
we try to deny the movement of differance, or at least momentarily
to stabilize its movement.
The metaphysics of presence is full of hierarchical oppositions:
mind/body, presence/absence, theory/practice, nature/culture, truth/
deception, reality/appearance, thought/language, content/form,
meaning/expression, literal/figurative. Here is an example of their
workings, taken from George Campbs.11's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776):
In contemplating a human creature, the most natural division of
the subject is the common division into soul and body, or into
the living principle of perception and of action, and that system
of material organs by which the other receives information from
without, and is enabled to exert its powers, both for its own
benefit and for that of the species. Analogous to this, there are
two things in every discourse which principally claim our attention,
the sense and the expression; or in other words, the thought and
the symbol by which it is communicated. These may be said to
constitute the soul and the body of an oration, or indeed of
whatever is signified to another by language. For, as in man, each
of these constituent parts hath its distinctive attributes, and as the
perfection of the latter consisteth in its fitness for serving the
purposes of the former, so it is precisely with those two essential
parts of every speech, the sense and the expression. (32)
Here Campbell analogizes the relationship between soul and body to
that between thought and expression; both metaphors in turn depend
on an inside/outside dichotomy. In both cases, of course, the exterior
function (body, language) exists solely to "serve the purposes of the
former" (soul, thought). Campbell was not alone among eighteenthcentury rhetoricians in employing this conceit, and it found its way
into a long-lived American pedagogical tradition that easily and
naturally separated "thought" or "content" from "language" or "form";
additionally, the tradition usually privileged the first pair of terms over
3(1
Reading/Writing Derrida
13
the second. On this model, "soul" and "thought" are close to originary
presence and are thus privileged; they are, quite literally, "insiders,"
while "body" and "writing" are the "outsiders" the envelopes or
cartons which carry them about and serve their purposes.
Supplementation
All such oppositions contain an interesting irony, however. In the case
of speech/writing, for example, metaphysics assumes that writing fills
in for, or replaces, speech. As Socrates says, writing "pretends to
speak." The irony is that speech, if it is a self-sufficient system of
communication, should permit no additions to itself, no supplements.
But speech does have a supplement, precisely, in writing. Further,
writing is never content simply to reflect or imitate speech; rather, it
pervades and constitutes that for which it substitutes. Derrida argues
that the fact of supplementation, the fact that writing can, and does,
substitute for speech reminds us, displays to us, differance in operation:
it shows that "somewhere, something can be filled up of itself, can
accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and
proxy:' (OG, 145). The supplement, writing, constitutes that which is
supplemented. M other words, it isn't until writing exists that speech
existsnothing exists until it is supplemented.
Derrida's critique of supplementation explains why the "art" of
classical rhetoric was invented, conceptualized, only when literate skills
were widely dispersed among the Greeks. Rhetoric, which is an art of
speech, came "into existence," came into consciousness, only when it
could be opposed to writing. Yet another example of supplementation
came to light in an early 1988 issue of Esquire magazine. It was argued
there that the generation of Americans known as "yuppies," in the
face of the threat posed by the AIDS virus, had replaced sex with
money; that is, they had supplemented a biological desire with a
culturally induced one, the desire for economic acquisition. Nevertheless, the relation of economics to desire is not an uncomplicated one;
it could be argued that the economic system itself stimulates biological
desire.
Thus supplementation works in two contradictory ways: it reinforces
presence, but it reminds us of its absence, as well:
The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching
another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates
and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, team, image,
representation, convention, etc., come as supplements to nature.... But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace.
31
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
14
It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if
one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the
anterior default of a presence. (OG, 144-45)
I:
In Western metaphysics, writing supplements speech (or, more primordially, speech supplements thought); ideally, the substitutability of
writing for speech reinforces the fullness, the plenitude, of presence.
Writing is yet another system of communication that can do the very
same thing that speech does. But here is the paradox: perversely,
writing never exactly substitutes for speech (or thought); anyone who
has read a transcript of a conversation, or who has tried to compose
a talk-aloud protocol of her writing process, can instantly see this. But
even more profoundly, writing never gets it exactly right; it never
imitates or copies what would be said or thought exactly, but instead
goes off under its own steam, does its own thing. Supplements never
substitute exactly; they always differ from, and defer, realization of
the "real" thing. Think, for example, of the ambivalent attitudes we
have about a photograph of an absent loved one; while the picture
re-minds us of the beloved, its presence also underscores, affirms, his
absence. Thus, the "real thing" is forever "under erasure"; it is both
already there and always not-there.
The Inexhaustibility of Interpretaticn
In "Signature, Event, Context:. Derrida argues that the crucial feature
of written discourse is precisely the author's absence from her text.
Were writers not absent from readers for temporal or geographical
reasons, after all, it would not be necessary for them to write. But
given the necessary absence of authors, writing has the ability to
generate a plenitude of readings or interpretations, a multitude of
meaning. According to Derrida,
a written sign, in the usual sense of the word, is therefore a mark
which remains, which is not exhausted in the present of its
inscription, and which can give rise to an iteration both in the
absence of and beyond the presence of the empirically determined
subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it. (MP,
317)
That is, thanks to its author's absence, any piece of writing, even the
smallest scrap, makes itself available to appropriation by readers and
other writers, who can, and do, interpret it in multiple ways.
32
Reading/Writing Derrida
15
The author's absence also permits writing to do its work with or
without a context: according to Derrida, "it belongs to the sign to be
legible . .. even if 1 do not know what its alleged author-scriptor meant
consciously and intentionally at the moment he wrote it, that is
abandoned it to its essential drifting" (MP, 317). Often readers have
no information about the specific context within which writing was
composed, but this lack does not keep them from being able to read
the text that results. But since any "written sign carries with it a force
of breaking with its context, that is, the set of presences which organize
the moment of its inscription:. any "real" context we might imagine
for a text is always constructed by its readers. For example, when we
find a scrap of paper with grocery items listed on it lying on the floor
of a deserted hallway, we have no immediate way of knowing who
its author might be or under what circumstances it was composed.
This is not to say, of course, that we cannot read it. But we know only
as much about it as our own experience with grocery lists and their
uses can supply us. And yet our desire to know what the writing
might "mean" is so strong that we can seldom resist the temptation
to supply a context for its composition--we suppose we recognize the
handwriting, and say to ourselves, "Ah hal Jones and her family plan
to have artichokes for dinner tonight:' That is, our desire to construct
a stable and specified meaning for texts is so strong that we invent
contexts when none are immediately available.' Such contexts are
sought precisely so that they might ground an (absent) writer's intention, and thus restrain the potential "meanings" of texts from proliferating into infinity.
English teachers are familiar with this process as it works in literary
studies; scholars attempt to find out all that can be known about, say,
George Eliot's "life and times" in order that we may have a context
that will permit us to understand her intention while composing, say,
Middiemarch. But Derrida would insist that we can never have complete
access to Eliot's intentions, as long as we look for these in writing by
or about her. Writing, which makes itself available to anyone who can
read, never authorizes a given reading all by itself, never tells us
exactly what it "means," least of all what its writer's intention might
have been. As Derrida remarks in Dissemination, "A text is not a text
unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of
its composition and the rules of its game" (63). Any written text may
be more or less immediately legible to anyone who is literate in the
language in which it is written. This is not to say, however, that a post
33
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
16
hoc examination of the circumstances of its compositionits author's
intentions, her writing habits, her physical state and the likewill
necessarily shed any light on its meaning.
But aside from its break with "external" contexts, another rift
characterizes the sign's "semiotic and internal context," according to
Derrida. This internal context, any stable formal structure posited for
a text, is broken by virtue of its "essential iterability; one can always
lift a written syntagma from the interlocking chain in which it is caught
or given without making it lose every possibility of functioning, if not
every possibility of 'communicating; precisely" ow 317). This iterability, or repeatability, of the written sign is what permits it to be cited,
grafted into other chains of signs, and harnessed to other uses than
the original author may have intended or foreseen (as I have just
illustrated by inserting "Derrida's" text into "mine"). But it is also this
feature of the written sign, its characteristic "breaking" with its internal
context, that compromises its status as "the vehicle, transport, or site
of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one" (ME 309). In
other words, since written texts can be radically dissociated from their
authors' putative intentions, the ability of their internal structure to
signal coherent units of "meaning" is also put into serious question.
Thus Derrida's work raises doubts about the status of writing as a
vehicle for "communication," if this metaphor is to be understood by
its association with media that are thought to transmit or ''hand over"
information, as in "telecommunication." Once again, this is not to say
that we cannot read a text. It is simply to observe that the meaning
we derive from reading is located as much in the process of reading,
and in the social and cultural contexts which surround our reading,
as it is in the "text itself."
Whence Grammatology?
Does Derrida's overturning, or underwriting, of Western metaphysics
signal the launching of an anti- program, a "positive grammatology,"
a "science of writing," that would simply invert the hierarchical
dichotomies mandated by presence? No. To invert dichotomies, to
privilege, say, language over thought, as Plato accused the Sophists of
doing, is to be caught, still, within metaphysics once again. Any project
aimed at constructing a theory of writing out of Derridean insights is
faced at the outset with a major difficulty. There is grave doubt whether
the study of writing may be the sort of "positive science" around
which theories can evolve.
34
Reading/Writing Derrida
17
In the Grammatology Derrida struggles with his realization that
a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as
such and with that name. Of never being able to define the unity
of its project or its object. Of not being able either to write its
discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field. (4)
Any alternative to Western metaphysics is necessarily bound within
the tradition that makes alternatives thinkable: as Derrida remarks,
the "fundamental condition" of a grammatology "is certainly the
undoing of logocentrism. But this condition of possibility turns into a
condition of impossibility," since "one must know what writing is in
order to askknowing what one is talking about and what the question
iswhere and when writing begins" (OG, 74-75). The dilemma is
this: to raise questions about the nature of writing is to ask questions
about its historicity and origin, questions that (can) be given empirical
answers, and that are irrevocably bound up with questions about
essences and thus with the metaphysics of presence.
Derrida argues that the "otherness" which founds writing in opposition to speech accounts for the fact that the scholarly study of
writing has amounted to re-constructing its history, for the most part.
Even though "all the great histories of writing open with an exposition
of a classificatory and systematic project," no such typology has ever
succeeded in making satisfactory distinctions among hieroglyphic,
pictographic, ideographic, syllabic, or alphabetic saipts.4 No matter
how these distinctions are made, some script or scripts always leak
through the cracks, cross the lines, their characters now acting like
hieroglyphs, now like pictograms. Derrida locates the theoretical insufficiency of histories of writing in
the false evidence that guides the work. Evidence all the more
efficacious because it belongs to the deepest, the oldest, and
apparently the most natural, the least historical layer of our
conceptuality, that which best eludes criticism, and especially
because it supports that criticism, nourishes it, and informs it; our
historical ground itself. (0G, 81-82).
That is, to construct a theory of writing that would undo its heretofore
silent role in history, to give a voice to writing, as it were, would be
to undo history itself. Such a move cannot (yet) be thought.
Nonetheless, the Western habit of opposing thought to writing can
be foregrounded and interrogated. At the very least such an interro-
gation sheds light on the intellectual conditions under which most
teachers of reading and writing do their work,
35
2 Deconstruction and the English
Profession
In the 1970s, a group of literary critics at Yale University introduced
American readers to Derrida's work. Thanks to the many books and
papers circulated by the so- called "Yale critics"Paul de Man, J. Hillis
Miller, and Geoffrey Hartman, among othersdeconstruction (or at
least its American version) has since become a recognizable school of
literary thought in this country. The intrusion of deconstruction into
the genteel industry that is American literary criticism initially caused
something of an uproar. And, because of its emphasis on writing,
teachers and theorists of composition also responded to the entry of
deconstruction onto the American critical scene. This chapter reviews
those reactions, and tries to account for some of the responses made
by English teachers toward deconstruction.
Traditional critics were pretty much agreed that a deconstructive
approach to the reading of literary texts was either trivial or (paradoxically enough) dangerous. The first important skirmish between
proponents of the older and newer schools of critical thought took
place in the late 1970s, when M. H. Abrams defended "traditional
historians of Western culture" against a perceived attack on them by
Yale critic J. Hillis Miller. Abrams listed the "essential premises" that
motivated traditional criticism as follows:
1. The bask materials of history are written texts; and the authors
who wrote these texts (with some off-center exceptions) exploited the possibilities and norms of their inherited language
to say something determinate, and assumed that competent
readers, insofar as these shared their own linguistic skills,
would be able to understand what they said.
2. The historian is indeed for the most part able to interpret not
only what the passages that he cites might mean now, but also
what their writers meant when they wrote them. Typically, the
historian puts his interpretation in language which is partly
his author's and partly his own; if it is sound, this interpretation
approximates, closely enough for the purpose at hand, what
the author meant.
19
3G
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
20
3. The historian presents his interpretation to the public in the
expectation that the expert reader's interpretation of a passage
will approximate his own and so confirm the "objectivity" of
his interpretation. (1977, 426)
In other words, traditional historians of culture, like traditional literary
critics, assumed that written texts contained some determinable co-
herent meaning, which had been put there in accordance with an
author's discernible intention (that is, the author's intention could be
discerned when the text was read by someone else). They further
assumed that "expert" readers of the same text would find similar
meanings in it. This assumption in turn guaranteed the critics' certainty
that meaning was somehow "objective," that it was embodied in the
text in such a way that any sensitive reader could ferret it out.
Thus Abrams assumed that an authoritative reading could be made
for a literary texta reading which would put a stop to all other
readings and which would, then, not itself be readable (that is, open
to criticism). Abrams wanted to establish stable and unassailable
interpretations for literary texts, thus assuming, from a deconstructive
point of view, that they enjoyed some special existence outside the
movement of differance. On Abrams's textual model, since transcen-
dental meanings ought to be found for important texts, arguments
about its meaning indicated that one of the parties to the dispute was
somehow misreading or misunderstanding the text at hand.
On the other hand, Abrams argued, deconstructive critics like Miller
accepted an entirely different set of notions about texts; they assumed
that there is no correct interpretation of a text, and further, that texts
authorize innumerable interpretations. Abrams concluded that deconstructive approaches to texts negate the possibility that critics, or any
readers, can ever understand a text or each other's readings of the
same text. While Abrams's account of deconstructive tenets is fair
enough, the conclusions he drawsthat deconstructive approaches to
texts negate the possibility that critics or readers can ever understand
a text or each other's readings of the same textare inaccurate. On a
deconstructive model of textuality, literary texts do not hold still and
docilely submit themselves to repeated identical readings; they can be
read and reread, and each reading differs from the last. Nor are critical
interpretations of texts copies of an original "meaning" that is somehow
housed in the original text. Interpretations, readings, differ from the
texts they interpret and from each other; and, having been read, they
require a re-reading of the "originary" text. This is why critical readings
of important texts can continue to be made, why the pages of PMLA
will always be filled up.
37
Deconstruction and the English Profession
21
In 1979 Murray Krieger identified these and other post-structural
claims about texts as major threats to the institutionalized study of
literature.' He began by arguing that "these recent theoretical notions.
by their very nature, have little or no interest in improving our capacity
for literary analysis" (32). That is, post-structural readings of texts are
quite unlike readings done according to the "new criticism"readings
that explicate, analyze, and interpret literary texts as though the context
in which they were produced is irrelevant and as though their internal
structures yield up sufficient clues to their interpretation. (New critical
readings produce articles and books with titles like "Blood and Roses:
Symbol and Structure in Hawthorne's Short Fiction.") Unlike new
critics, deconstructive critics were emphatically not interested in producing more critical commentaries that aimed at taking literary texts
apart in order to decide what they meant. Nor were they particularly
interested in establishing single, authoritative readings for canonical
texts.
However, Krieger correctly discerned that post-structural notions
about texts posed a serious threat to the new critical assumption that
"literary discourse is a significant variant of discourse at large' That
is to say, post-structural notions about the nature of written discourse
call into question the traditional assumption that literary discourse is
somehow special, that (in Krieger's words) "the literary work is created
as such through deviations from 'normal discourse' that are manipulated into an object that manifests its full and totalizing presence"
(1979, 32). Like more traditional critics, Krieger assumed that the
formal features of literary discourse, which are somehow superior to,
and different from, those used in "ordinary" (non-literary) discourse,
endowed literature with some special qualities of completeness, fullness, and self-sufficiency Of course, it is precisely the assumption that
literary discourse is more "real" or "enduring" than other sorts of
discourse that has enabled English departments to grow and flourish.
Radical critics also found reasons to dismiss deconstruction. Despite
its perceived threat to the literary establishment, deconstruction was
denounced by leftist critics who saw it as "politically bankrupt;' since
it contained no theory of social change and offered no program for
altering the status quo. Radical critics mounted the same critique
against deconstruction as they had against new criticismneither
critical program, they argued, had any built-in facility for immersing
literary texts in the political and cultural contexts which shape them,
and on which they comment. The only difference between deconstruction and new criticism, as far as many radical critics could see, was
that deconstruction's incipient critique of determinate meaning seemed
38
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
22
more daring, more risky, than did the traditional critic's clinging to
textual objectivity. As Marxist critic Terry Eagleton put it, "deconstruc-
tion is as disorienting in North America as it was for Mrs. Moore in
India; it thus provides you with all the risks of a radical politics while
cancelling the subject who might be summoned to become an agent
of them" (1981, 139). Eagleton seems to imply here that the concept
of a self-motivated actor is requisite to any theory or pragmatics of
social action.
Radical teachers and critics were especially disappointed by the
"received standard version" of deconstruction that evolved in American
departments of English thanks to the influence of the Yale critics. In
their hands, the radicals argued, deconstruction had become only a
slick disguise for new criticism, all dressed up in a new language. As
Michael Ryan put it the Yale school translated "a complex philosophy
into an old-model new criticism from which the muffler has been
removed, creating more noise without noticeably improving the speed."2
This perceived devolution of deconstructive thought into just another
critical approach has lent force to the analyses of those critics who
now say that its advent onto the American critical scene simply "makes
no difference" (to borrow from the title of a book by Michael Fischer).
Deconstruction had its defenders, of course, in the Yale criti:s and
those they influenced. Such persons hailed deconstructive thought as
the solution to the intellectual stagnation in which literary criticism
was mired after its wholesale adoption of the new criticism in the
1950s and 1960s. In the late 1970s, J. Hillis Miller articulated a
deconstructive attitude toward traditional critical thought. Such work,
he contended, tended to "freeze into a quasi-s:ientific discipline
promising exhaustive rational certainty in the identification of meaning
in a text and in the identification of the way that meaning is produced"
(Hartman 1979, 249). Miller cited an essay by Abrams, who had
suggested (according to Miller) that texts have, or ought to have, an
"obvious and univocal" reading. Miller argued that no such readings
were possible. The only reading that could be truly "univocal," after
allone which could speak with only one voicewould simply replace
the original text; the authority of the critical work would obviate the
need to read the literary work it interpreted. Because this is the case,
Miller said, "criticism is a human activity which depends for its validity
on never being at ease within a fixed 'method.' It must constantly put
its own grounds in question" (Hartman 1979, 249). For Miller, as well
as for many other critics, deconstruction offered them the most fruitful
and rigorous means of putting their own methods into question, and
thus of producing richer and more self-aware readings of literary texts.
39
23
Deconstruction and the English Profession
Indeed, in an impressive series of works published during the 1970s,
Miller, de Man, Hartman and company demonstrated that deconstructive approaches to major texts yielded new and exciting insights about
them.
People who are interested in composition and its teaching have also
responded to post-structural theory, but the debate over it in those
circles has been carried on with much less intensity than among literary
critics. In an essay published in College Composition and Communication
in 1984, Edward White conjectured that post-structural thought had
enjoyed a more congenial reception from writing teachers than it had
from literary critics, because, rather than threatening any well-established
foundations, post-structural notions about language were comfortably
compatible with much recent speculation in composition theory:
These reading theories thus provide even more substantial theoretical justification for reacting to student writing as if it were part
of a process.... There is a fundamental ground of practical good
sense in contemporary literary theory that helps us understand
why the best of us teach the way we do, and why we have so
much treuble communicating writing theory to our colleap.les for
whom the New Criticism is still new. (187)
Here White noticed the consonance of post-structural notions of
textuality with those that are bound up, if only implicitly, in "process
pedagogy!'
Other writing teachers have found that deconstruction offers some
useful grounds from which to initiate critiques of traditional writing
instruction. For example, Susan Miller (1982) has written a convincing
deconstructive reading of the curious status of textbooks in composition
instruction, and J. Hillis Miller (1983) put deconstruction to work in
order to disassemble the set of restrictive notions about metaphor
which appear in traditional composition textbooks.
Other composition teachers have used deconstructive notions in a
more generative fashion. In an essay entitled "Making Differences in
the Composition Class: A Philosophy of Invention," William Covino
demonstrated how deconstructive notions support and reinforce composition teachers' assumption that invention is an important part of
the writing process. As he remarked, writing teachers
must connect literacy, understood as the power to use language
appropriately and effectively, with Invention, which must be
understood as the unifying term for the whole process of composition. Jacques Derrida's post-structuralist stance commands our
attention, because it signals a new appreciation for playful invention as the wry center and circumference of all language. (1981, 1)
40
24
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
Of course, a deconstructive pedagogy womid locate invention within
the movement of language itself, rather than in the individual writer,
as much current composition theory does.
But deconstruction has not enjoyed unalloyed success among wilting
teachers and composition theorists. In 1986, Jon Hamed dismissed
deconstruction out of hand, arguing that it is too esoteric for the
workaday needs of writing teachers. Like traditional literary critics,
Hamed saw that deconstruction challenges some basic assumptions
about writing instruction. Nevertheless he minimized the potential
impact of deconstructive analyses on composition instruction by arguing
that writing teachers are not "likely to be convinced" by the poststructural "attempt to make everything disappear into a haze of
language" (14). And rhetorician Ross Winterowd wrote off deconstruction as a potential source of writing theory, initially because Derrida's
own texts are difficult (1983). But Winterowd further characterized
Derrida's theorizing as dilettante, if not downright anti-social, classing
it with a vulgarized version of Romanticism known as "vitalism"
(1987, 269).
The Role of Theory in Teaching
Reading and Writing
On( of my colleagues recently sent me a news clipping recounting a
discussion that had taken place at a meeting of literary critics. According
to the clipping, which I paraphrase, the respected literary critic who
had given the keynote addiess at the meeting announced that "de-
construction is dead on both coasts:' A member of the audience
promptly regretted the death of deconstruction at Yale and Berkeley,
avowing that deconstruction was at least alive and well in Oklahoma.
With that, a third member of the audience accounted for its death on
the coasts by noting that "deconstruction is staled in Cincinnati."
I recount this anecdote partly to introduce the theme of this chapter
of my essay and partly to justify my continuing interest in deconstruc-
tion, despite the fact that it has been pronounced dead at some
institutions of higher learning. My theme here is simply that adherence
to any theory within English departments is partly a matter of politics;
one's choice of a theoretical stance dictates not only one's teaching
practices but also bears an important relationship to one's status within
the English profession. This is as true of adherents to more traditional
theories of reading and writing as it is of those who have adopted
post-structuralist positions.
41
Deconstruction and the English Profession
25
Despite official announcements of their demise, deconstruction and
post-structuralism have affected the politics of American departments
of English in fundamental ways. In many colleges and universities,
literary theory has become a more respectable teaching interest than
it once was, and university teachers can now be hired because they
are "theorists" or "deconstructionists" or "post-structuralists" rather
than "Miltonists" or "Claucerians." And, as White (1984) noted, the
new emphasis on literary theory is congenial, in many respects, with
the recent growth of interest in rhetoric and composition theory, fields
whose assumptions about language are sometimes compatible with
those made in post-structural thought.
Despite these developments, post-structuralism, and especially that
branch of it called "deconstruction," is still more heard about than
read and more notorious than respected. 1 suspect that the clamor that
surrounds deconstruction is often a product of simple or willful
misunderstanding of its program and of its pedagogical and political
potential.' But the cacophony of voices that surrounds deconstruction
might also be taken as testimony to its fertility for rethinking the
nature of literary criticism, as well as the pedagogies that are traditionally used in teaching reading and writing.
A while back, I attended a lecture given by a distinguished literary
critic who performed a perceptive, charming, and persuasive reading
of some aspects of poet Wallace Stevens's life and work. In a subsequent
talk, the critic argued that the aim of all literary pedagogy should be
to politicize studentsto make them aware, as far as possible, that
they and their culture subscribe to a number of constraining ideologies
regarding class, sex, and race. Since 1 am in sympathy with his proposal,
I asked him, in the discussion session that followed, exactly how he
went about accomplishing the politicization of his students, in his
classroom, every day. How, for example, would he incorporate his
brilliant reading of Stevens's perplexity about questions of gender into
a course in American literature? The critic was reluctant to answer my
question and even seemed embarrassed for me. He apparently thought
that by asking him for a lesson plan, or an account of what he does
on Monday, I was demeaning myself (and him, by implication). At
least a member of the audience rescued both of us from the embarrassing impasse that ensued by asking another question.
I recount this anecdote because I want to illustrate a bifurcation
that is currently at work within the English teaching profession. I refer,
of course, to the bifurcation between theory and practice. It is possible,
these days, to speak both of "reading theory" and "writing theory";
both activities are currently undergoing scrutiny on a level that can
42
26
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
only be called "theoretical!' The act of reading has recently been
radically redefined by theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish,
and Jane Tompkins; such thinkers view reading as a constructive act
wherein readers recreate texts while they read them. Writing is also
the subject of a good deal of current theoretical speculation; while
philosophers like Derrida and Richard Rorty are studying its uniqueness
as a kind of language use, cognitive psychologists are investigating
the process by which people produce it.
But reading and writing are also practices that are widely employed
in society at large. More, they are practices whose ubiquity lends
support to yet another kind of practice: they are taught in school.
Most students who matriculate from any institution of learning in
America have studied both from the time they were able to manage
either. Nevertheless, as my anecdote about the literary critic illustrates,
the practice of reading pedagogy (called "teaching literature" in Erig fish
departments) is generally "occulted," as deconstructive critics say, at
least after students leave elementary school. The practice of teaching
people to read difficult and culturally influential texts is carried on,
for the most part, as though it were innocent of theory, as though it
were a knack that anyone could pick up by practicing it.
But such work is manifestly not innocent of theory; no one who
thinks much about such matters can doubt that new critical assumptions
about the nature of texts inform a good deal of current literary
pedagogy.' In 1984, William Cain noted that "New Critical attitudes,
values, and emphases" are "so deeply ingrained in English studies ... that we do not even perceive them as the legacy of a particular
movement" (105). Rather, Cain argued, the new criticism
has been transformed into "criticism," the essence of what we do
as teachers and critics.... its lessons about literary study lead a
vigorous life, setting the norms for effective teaching and marking
the boundaries within which nearly all criticism seeks to validate
itself, It is the New Criticism that defines and gives support to the
central job of work that we perform: "practical criticism," the "close
reading" of literary texts. "Close reading" forms the substance of
most critical essays and books, and it is reinforced in our classrooms,
where we teach verbal analysis to students. (1984, 105)
And if the new criticism informs most literary pedagogy, it has also
exerted a powerful influence on writing instruction. Since many teachers
of writing were trained to be teachers of literature, and have no training
in composition at all, it is only natural that they transfer the set of
43
27
Deconstruction and the English Profession
assumptions made about texts in new criticism into their teaching of
composition.
If I am right about this, teachers of literature who were trained in
new critical approaches to literary texts, if they are consistent, must
inevitably transfer their thinking about such texts to the studentauthored texts they read. That is, such persons will think of student
texts as the finished products of their authors' coherent and determinable intention. They will assume further that an analysis of the text's
structure and content should reveal some coherent meaning, and
should give some clue to its author's intention. Such teachers will also
assume that their reading of such texts is authoritative, given their
expert status as readers. They further assume that the meaning they
discern on the page has some "objective" status. Thus the student
authors of such texts ought to be able to see the meaning (or lack
thereof) that their teachers see in a completed paper.
Another set of textual assumptions, whose tenets are in many ways
compatible with those of the new criticism, has also been brought to
bear in writing instruction. Until 1970 or so, many teachers of writing
subscribed, consciously or not, to a discernible and coherent theory of
composition, now known as "current-traditional rhetoric." This theory
dictates that texts should be thought of as products of a writer's
coherent intention; that the presence of ill- or well-formed formal
features in texts (sentences; paragraphs, thesis statements) is indicative
of the quality of the writer's thought; that texts can or ought to be
composed within a numiler of formal generic constraints ("expressive";
"expository"), and so on. Most composition teachers assimilated cur-
rent-traditional thought from their own teachers or from textbooks.
And, like new criticism in literary pedagogy, the traditional model is
still very much alive in writing instruction, influencing course design,
textbook selection, choice of preferred genres, and the nature of
assignments.
Aside from their possible subscription to these two more or less
occulted theories of textuality, most teachers of writing have had access
to very little writing theory. Until quite recently, in fact, most of what
was known about teaching writing was an accretion of practical lore,
built up over time within the community of its practitioners. As
Stephen North argues in The Making of Knowledge in Composition
(1987), "practice clearly... remains now, not only a distinguishable
mode of inquiry, but the one most widely pursued in the field" (22).
North characterizes the "lore" generated by practitioners as having
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A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
several characteristics, among the most notable of which is its imperviousness to fully rationalized critique. Lore is absolutely inclusive:
according to North,
literally anything can become a part of lore. The only requirement
for entry is that the idea, notion, practice, or whatever be nominated: some member of the community must claim that it worked,
or seemed to work, or might work. (24)
Too, nothing that has gained admission is ever dropped from lore,
even though some of its tenets might in this way become contradictory:
"'Know what you want to say before you begin to write. 'Write in
order to find out what you want to say: 'Never use the first person.
'It's perfectly all right to use the first person: " North's examples of
potential contradiction point up the hazards of grounding the teaching
of writing in practitioner lore.
A teacher's subscription to any theory of textuality influences nearly
all of the decisions he makes when teaching reading and writing. And
if his subscription to this or that theory has not been carefully
articulated, he is liable to confuse his students in fundamental ways.
For example, if a practitioner accepts recent lore concerning "process
pedagogy" but has not altogether rejected traditional composition
theory, it will be difficult for him to discern whether his particular
combination of the two pedagogies entails contradictions or confusions.
Because of the properties of practitioner lore, which has no mechanism for rejecting incompatible theories or strategies, this teacher is
not encouraged to inquire whether the two pedagogical models
current-traditional and writing-as-processconflict in serious ways.
Unless he theorizes about these matters, he will not be able to determine
whether his new emphasis on writing-as-process fits comfortably within
the traditional understanding that texts exist inside identifiable generic
categories (exposition, argumentation, the "personal essay" and so on).
Does the task of writing produce a continuous flow of discourse, or
ought written texts to emerge from writers' pens in such a way as to
conform to identifiable generic and structural requirements? If the two
notions are in conflict, such a teacher risks confusing his students (and
himself) on a fundamental level.
As should be obvious by now, I think that reading and writing
pedagogies are inevitably grounded in theory, whether these theories
are consciously subscribed to or not. If a pedagogical strategy is to be
coherent, then, its teachers must articulate its rationale for themselves
as fully as possible. Such a fully articulated rationale will explain why
one strategy may be preferred to another; more, it will help teachers
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Deconstruction and the English Profession
to understand the ideological ramifications of their teaching strategies.
To subscribe to current-traditional rhetoric, for example, is to adopt its
positivist underpinnings, with all that entails about the methodical
movement of thought and the representative role of languages
Like the new criticism and current-traditional rhetoric, deconstruction
is a theory of textuality. Unlike them, however, its ramifications for
the processes of reading and writing have been carefully articulated
by Derrida and his commentators. But deconstruction is also a practice,
and this practice is performed and illustrated, over and over, in Derrida's
writing. This analytic, or critical, feature of deconstruction renders it
particularly interesting for teachers of reading and writing. On the
theoretical level, deconstruction provides a relatively coherent descrip-
tion of the nature of texts and textuality, a description whose tenets
should help us to verify the coherence of any models of the writing
process we construct. On the level of critique, deconstruction should
do for traditional writing instruction what it does for texts: it can
provide a means of reading current classroom techniques in such a
way as to expose their strengths and deficiencies.
46
3 Deconstructing Writing
Pedagogy
Deconstruction, and its concern with metaphysics, minds, and the
history of Western philosophy may seem so esoteric as to be far
removed from the needs of the classroom teacher of English. I don't
think that this is the case, however. Aside from its intrinsic interest,
deconstruction harbors a number of important implications for the
teaching of English. For one thing, it presents some interesting model
for reading and studying literary texts (and student texts as well),
models which might be profitably emulated in reading or writing
pedagogy. For another, deconstructive insights about teaching, language, and writing offer up a critioue on which we can hang much
of the pedagogical practice that has been adopted by writing teachers
in recent years.
However, a deconstructive reading of English teaching carries with
it a good many negative implications, insofar as it calls into question
some of the basic assumptions that have always taken for granted in
such teaching.' For example, a deconstructive analysis undermines the
notion that the composing process begins with an originating author;
this notion characterizes both traditional and process pedagogies of
composition. Deconstruction also rejects the traditional characterization
of writing as a repetition of the same (as is now the case with
instruction in expository writing, which is supposed to re- present --picture, imitate, copysome piece of a student's knowledge). Such an
analysis also challenges the notion that Informs and permeates traditional pedagogy: that language is a transparent representation of the
world and/or of the minds which populate it.
Reassuringly enough, a deconstructive reading of writing pedagogy
underscores the appropriateness of much of the lore connected with
process pedagogy. It also demonstrates, however, that some alterations
remain to be considered, if we take deconstructive notions about
language seriously. But challenges like these can strengthen a tradition
31
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A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
32
that survives them. As Vincent Leitch has remarked with regard to
Derrida's own engagement with pedagogical issues, to threaten a
system of beliefs is also to "foster inquiry and transformation" (1985,18).
Sovereignty and Authority
As I tried to establish earlier in this essay, post-structural thought
raises serious objections to the metaphysical fiction that would place
a sovereign, self-aware consciousness at the center of any composing
act. I don't think it is unfair to say that traditional thinking about
writing has been author-centered, and that, as a consequence, writing
pedagogy has always focused on authorsspecifically on their intentions and psychology. Apparently, the view that the writing process
begins and ends with an individual author is a historical phenomenon
whose ubiquity in modern thought has to do with attitudes toward
discourse that were developed during the seventeenth century.2 This
attitude still prevails in our thinking, although post-structuralist historians have begun to question its staying power.
In our own time, the author-centeredness of writing pedagogy has
given rise to a school of research into composing that studies the
mental habits of composers. These researchers are trying to devise a
mockl of the composing process that is supposed to reflect the
composing process used by all writers. They draw on cognitive psychology for their rationale and techniques, assuming that this discipline
which studies "the human mind" can provide us a key to understanding
the nature of writing.
But the assumption that authorial minds are solely responsible for
the production of written texts is also held by composition theorists
who are not explicitly tied to cognitivist models. In many cases, the
author-centeredness of the it theories of composition derives from their
unwitting subscription to the metaphysics of presence. For example,
C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon appen "he following footnote to
the opening chapter of their Rhetorical Daditions and the Teaching of
Writing:
Composing is a richer concept than "writing" and wherever we
use the term we mean to designate the forming/shaping activities
of mind, not merely the learned behaviors associated with writing
in the narrowest senseusing a pen or pencil, making the letters
of written discourse, using the technical conventions of the written
language, and so on. The distinction is crucially important because
"composing" is a natural human endowment while "writing" is
learned. Yet writing means next to nothing if divorced from the
larger concept of "composing." (1984, 19-20)
48
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
33
To a reader who is alert to the deconstructive directions taken by
language, this comment is reminiscent of the traditional canard that
"thinking" (here called "composing") precedes writing. Not only that,
thinking is better than writing, since the former takes place in an
author's mind, while writing takes place in language. "Composing" is
"natural" for Knoblauch and Brannon, but writing is not; writing is
artificial, foreign, monstrous, almost meaningless, an unnatural act.
Writing is not self-sufficient on this model; rather it is a technology
that depends for its value on some other process which is more
essentially human, more present to itself.
The post-structural critique of the notion of the sovereign self poses
a number of difficulties for a research program, or a pedagogy, centered
on the psychology of authors. As Derrida points out in the Grammatology, psychology can only survive by positing a "naturalist opposition"
between "internal" and "external" experience. The difficulty is that,
on a psychological model, writing is, stubbornly, an "exteriority"; we
will never be able to account for writing by looking for some "interiority" that exists above or beyond or in back of it. Even if students
of the composing process find a research technique that permits them
to establish a model of the writing process which describes, in the
most minute physiological or psychological detail, what happens in
the minds or brains of people who write, we will nevertheless have
learned nothing about the uses to which writers put language, which
by definition is never private. And if psychologists or psycholinguists
succeed in finding or describing some mechanism that accounts for
the production of language, they will not have made much progress
toward grasping the nature of writing, the uses of which depend on
its availability to the community that is served and defined by it.
Further, since writing is made up of language, it both precedes and
succeeds individual writers. Thus a deconstructive attitude toward
writing pedagogy will focus its attention away from individual authors
and toward the language currently in use in the community served
by the pedagogy.
Because of both its implicit critique of the sovereign self and its
emphasis on the absence of readers from the composing act, deconstructive attitudes toward language allow us to redefine many of the
crucial terms with which we work every dayterms like "reader's and
"writer." In a review of Derrida's The Post Card (1984), Gayatri Spivak
argues that the "scene of writing" (what composition theorists call the
"composing process") requires absence as its necessary condition. That
is, the scene of writing denies the sovereign authorial presence so
often invoked by traditional pedagogy. Spivak notes that "when a
49
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
34
man writes, he is in a structure that needs his absence as its necessary
condition (writing is defined as that which can necessarily be read in
the writer's absence)" (1984, 19). That is, when (if) a writer writes,
he does so because the desired audience is not immediately present.
Its "presence;' if you will, is fictional; it "exists" only insofar as the
writer imaginatively embodies it, as some construct of future reader(s).
What is even more curious, the scene of writing thus mandates the
writers pluralization; for the duration of composing, writer becomes
audience, a move that must be made in order for there to be a motive
for writing at all. Spivak argues that writers resist this pluralization of
themselves, and that readers conspire with them by assuming that the
discourse has been produced by a writing "self": as she puts it,
when a person reads, the scene of writing is usually ignored and
the argument is taken as the product of a self with a proper name.
Writers and readers are thus accomplices in the ignoring of the
scene of writing. (20)
This misperception of the act of writing is enhanced by the installment
of writing between the covers of papers, books, and anthologies, whose
white margins allow readers to think the writing "contained" therein
is complete, and more, that it represents the completed thought of the
person whose name is attached to them. When readers read, then,
they are seduced by textual artifacts into believing that the text was
composed by an integrated "self;' who possessed a unified "intention,"
and who carried out that intention with more or less success. In other
words, they assume that the written discourse somehow re-presents
the "thoughts" or "intentions" of its "writer."
But the Derridean critique of the inability of selves to "re-present"
themselves in language demonstrates that all of this is yet another
metaphysical construct. As Jasper Neel explains,
most Western writers assume that writing serves as a vehicle to
carry thought. But this assumption remains forever haunted by
the problem that thinking (at least in the Western sense of thinking)
cannot appear outside writing. Something at the core of thinking
seems to be missing. Writing adds what is missing but in doing
so reveals the incompleteness of the thing that needs a supplement
to be itself. . . . This process of supplementation endangers thought
because writing, rather than merely serving as an empty vehicle
waiting to transport and then discharge thought whole, adds itself
to and then substitutes itself for thought. (1988, 162)
What readers read is writing, not thought.
And yet the fiction of authorial sovereignty is lent enormous force
by the power relationship that is inherent in all writing, when seen
50
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
35
from the writer's point of view.3 The solitude that often accompanies
the act of writing seduces writers into believing that they are engaged
in individual acts of creation; it is all too easy to forget, while writing,
that one's language belongs to a community of speakers and writers,
that one has begun writing in order to reach (absent) readers, and
that one's "innovative ideas" have long textual histories behind them,
histories which contain many many voices. Think, for example, of the
voices that speak throughout this writing: Derrida's, of course, but
also Jasper Neel's, Aristotle's, Gayatri Spivak's, Meyer Abrams's,
Barbara Johnson's, and on and on.
Because of the illusion of authorial sovereignty, it is difficult for
writers to acknowledge the inevitable immersion of their own voices
in the flow of differance. Two groups are excepted from this generalization. The first consists of experienced writers, who have learned
throughout many trials the difficulty of getting readers to "see" what
was "meant." Over time these writers have learned to assume the
point of view of potential readers, whose voices are always being
heard during the writing process (in the back of the head, so to speak).
Such writers produce "readerly" prose, and can carry on an imagined
dialogue with potential readers as they compose. In other words,
experienced writers know how to submit themselves to the flow of
the community's language. The second group consists of inexperienced
writers, who find their own voices simply drowned out by those of
teachers and other sources of discursive authority. In a sense, then,
inexperienced writers are more in touch with the flow of differance
than are writers who accept the fiction of authorial sovereignty.
Assuming a deconstructive perspective, then, I must argue that to
center a writing pedagogy on authors, rather than on readers and the
common language of the community, is to insert an attitude into the
composing act that misunderstands its focus. I would argue further
that traditional composition pedagogy begins from the notion of
authorship, not only because of its immersion in the metaphysics of
presence, but also because the teachers who design such courses are
writers whose work commands a good deal of authority, while their
students are only readers, at least within the confines of the writing
classroom.
Ironically enough, teachers do most of the writing in composition
classesthey write the syllabus, the assignments, and the daily lesson
plans; they re-write the textbook in the sense that they interpret it for
their students; and finally, they write (revise, edit, grade) their students'
papers. Students, on the other hand, spend most of their time reading:
they read the teaches to determine what he "wants"; they read the
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A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
textbooks or anthologies he has assigned to find out what he wants
them to know; they read his assignments to determine what he wants
them to do. When they "write" in response to his assignments, they
tell him what they think he wants to hear and write according to the
rules he wants to see realized in their papers. Almost never do they
envisica themselves as having something to teach their ieachers.
As teachers, it is all too easy for us to be seduced into acting as the
only writers of/in a writing course, to refuse students the opportunity
to wrest that role from us. And it is even easier for students to accept
the role of perpetual reader, inasmuch as they have been invited to
do just this throughout most of their school lives. And yet to do so is
to ignore the movement of writing, of differance, that always postpones
the achievement of final authority for discourse. Deconstruction assumes the complicitly of writers and readers in all acts of composing.
That is, readers of any discourse become its writers as they re-construct
a "meaning" for it.
If writing teachers find this argument compelling, there are some
strategies available to them. They can reject or redefine some of the
traditional strategies that implicitly reinforce their power as writers of
the composition course. One of these is the notion of intention. As
William Covino remarks, if we accept deconstructive notions about
writing,
all writing takes place without finality because finality is located
in some sort of definition or purpose.... We may suspect that
our insistence as teachers upon "writing with a purpose" deserves
questioning insofar as it subordinates "strategy without finality"
to "the self-assured certitude of consciousness." (1981, 2)
At the very least, any pedagogy which insists that students' papers
reflect "the self-assured certitude of consciousness" must contradict
the daily experience of writing teachers. A deconstructive pedagogy,
on the other hand, would redirect the notion of intention or purpose
away from examination of a text and onto its suitability to the rhetorical
situation for which it was designed. Perhaps it would even reject the
notion of intention altogether and substitute the task of incorporating
the projected needs of audiences into the writing process.
A deconstructive analysis begins by assuming that writing is communal, that, as Michael Ryan puts it, "writing can belong to anyone;
it puts an end to the ownership or self-identical property that speech
signaled" (1982, 29). The failure of writing to signal its ownership by
anyone is, of course, exactly why Plato's Socrates condemned it:
Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may
be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of
52
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
37
those who understand it, but equally of those who have no
business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people,
and not address the wrong. (275e)
It may be misguided as well as uncharitable of me to charge Plato
with hierarchizing the reading public here, but it seems unmistakable
that he wanted to reserve the use of writing for those who understood
its power. Apparently he detested or feared the democratic tendency
of writing, its insistence on making itself available to any who can
read.
The public nature of writing, its refusal to be possessed by either
writer or reader, works itself out in several interesting ways. First of
all, it supports the notion recently advanced by some composition
theorists that all writing is collaborative. Research into the production
of writing in the marketplace has established that most of this sort of
work is the product of many hands.4 It is also the case, however, that
much writing for which authors take individual credit is, in fact,
collaborative. By way of illustration, I repeat a story told by Tilly
Warnock, a teacher of writing:
One cold July night several years ago at Vedauwoo, during the
Wyoming Conference on Freshman and Sophomore English, several people were talking beside the fire when one man began
explaining how ex,'..;;Asted he was from revising his textbook. We
asked how he writes. He described his writing v :ocess in detail
but seemed particularly pleased with the stage when he passes
his draft to his wife, who is not in English, so that she can detect
the b.s. in his work. Because I was delighted by his account, I
asked if he included such collaboration as a common stage for
writers in his textbook. He drew himself to full height, a large
shadow against the flames and silhouettes of the mysteriously
shaped mountains, and replied indignantly, "Every word I write
is my own." The conversation ended. (1985, 305)
Such husband-wife collaborations are no doubt numerous; many are
acknowledged, however, only in prefaces or dedications that thank
spouses for their "unfailing patience and dedication to the manuscript."
One also wonders about the role of Milton's daughters in the composition of Paradise Lost, the women who "recorded" the poem while
the blind poet dictated. Other, silent collaborators are editors, only a
few of whom, like Maxwell Perkins (who fashioned Thomas Wolfe's
chaotic manuscripts into readable novels), are ever credited for the
writing they do on a text. From a Derridean point of view, editorship
of a work-in-progress, or any reading of it, counts as part of its writing.
This is equally true for the writing classroom. Thus the students who
read their colleagues' works-in-progress and comment on them are as
53
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38
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
much a part of their composition as is the "original" author; this is
true of teacherly readings as well.
Indeed, even from a single "originary" writer's point of view, the
instigation of writing simply cannot be isolated from its contexts, which
are myriad. They include not only the writer, her sense of her present
state and her memory of her past; they include her attitude toward
the present assignment, her teacher, her class, the other students in
it, toward schooling in general and her schooling in particular, her
past experiences with writing and with writing classes and assignments.
They also include her physical state at the time of writing, and the
tools she uses; and perhaps less obviously they include her role in,
and attitude toward, the communities of which she is a parther
family, her friends, her neighborhood, ghetto or barrio, her town, city,
or reservation. Nor, because of the play of differance, are any of these
contexts staticthey are interrelated and constantly shifting their
relationships with one another.
But if all writing is collaborative and contextual in its composition,
its reception is multiple, public, as well. This implies that classroom
writing, like all writing, is, theoretically at least, available to anyone
who can read. This theoretical availability can be realized m practice
when students are encouraged to immerse their classroom writing into
the flow of whatever public discourse is going on around themin
their institutions, workplaces, or communities. In fact, the dissemination
of classroom writing into the discourse of the school or larger community may be one solution to the difficulty that haunts much student
writingits lack of motivation. A deconstructive pedagogy would
engage students with issues that concern them directly, socially, and
politically, and would direct the resulting discourses into the communities where such things matter: city or tribal council meetings,
neighborhood groups, sorority meetings, school board meetings, landlords' associations, planning authorities, parents' groups, and the like.
Supplementation and Method
As my readers will have surmised by now, the deconstructive notion
of supplementarity problematizes several canards that we use in our
teaching. When we tell students to "say what they think" or to "write
what they mean;' we ignore the differing, supplemental facets of
writing. More profoundly, differance and supplementarity problematize
our easy separation of thought from language, content from form,
meaning from expression, as well as the priority we assign to the first
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39
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
term in each opposition. However deconstructive thought does not
authorize a simple reversal of such priorities. To privilege form over
content, for example, as much instruction based on current-traditional
rhetoric does when it centers on the paragraph" or "the thesis
statement," is simply to be trapped within logocentrism once again.'
More pertinently to our work as teachers, it is to misunderstand the
nature of writing, which consists of signifiers, of signs representing
signs representing signs, to infinity.
In Dissemination, Derrida has some provocative things to say about
traditional notions about composingcalled "method" by its seventeenth-century progenitors.' Rene Descartes, for example, proposed
that composition could move in two directions. Analytic methodthe
method of inquirymoved from effect to cause or from the specific
to the general in such a way that an account of an analytic inquiry
would exactly represent the way in which its results were discovered.
Synthetic methodthe method of presentationmoved from cause
to effect or from general to specific; since conclusions had already
been derived by means of analysis, the writer who worked with
synthetic method could present them first. Throughout the methodical
tradition, synthetic method was characterized as less valuable, and
secondary to, analysis, since it was less original. Or, to use a favorite
Derridean metaphor, the work of synthesis, gathering up and distributing what had previously been thought, was parasitic on, and reductive
of, some more primary work. (Incident ly, synthetic method was enshrined in traditional composition instruction as the five-paragraph
essay, which moves from the general to the specific and which repeats
for the reader some investigation that has always already taken place
through other means.)
Derna's comments on method come about in the context of his
meditation on the puzzle of "the preface"that part of the text which
announces itself as coming before the text, "pre-speaking it," and yet
which is ordinarily written after the text is finished. The preface claims
to embody or summarize, or at least to introduce, what is contained
in the rest of the work. This irruption of the preface into the composing
process, and its dissemination into the "work itself;' interests Derrida
partly because it provides graphic testimony to the failure of composition ever to proceed in the orderly fashion dictated by method. The
preface graphically signals that fact that "thc text is no longer the
snug airtight inside of an .nteriority or an identity-to-itself ... but
rather a different placement of the effects of opening and closing"
(Dis, 36). Once again, texts move, open and close, come and go. They
refuse to submit themselves to the stabilizing dichotomy of method,
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A Teacher's introduction to Deconstruction
which would insist that texts are first thought, and that then they are
written.
The traditional assumption that thinking precedes writing is derived
directly from method, as this was delineated in the eighteenth- century
rhetoric and logic texts that spawned traditional writing pedagogy.
Recently, traditional composition textbooks have altered the language
in which they couch their linear model of composing; the stage which
nineteenth-century text writers called "thought" has been converted
to "prewriting," and the older two-stage model ("thought" and "presentation") now has three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting.
But this shift in nomenclature does not constitute a fundamental
alteration in traditional notions about writing. "Prewriting techniques,"
or "heuristics," no matter how intricate, nevertheless presume that
writers first engage in some activity that is not necessarily linguistic
before they begin to write.
On a deconstructive model of the writing process, of course, beginnings, endings, middles and muddles are not quite so clearly demarcated. I wonder, for example, exactly when I began the "prewriting"
for this book. Did it begin with my first reading of the Grammatolosy
in 1978? Or with the composition of my first essay about deconstruction
(in 1979)? And had I finished 14 ith prewriting when I entered the first
lines of this essay into my computer? Not necessarily, since these lines
came from a paper 1 had delivered at a meeting long before the
composition of this essay was suggested to me. I was still rereading
Derrida when I entered those hand-me-down lines, hoping they would
break the spell of "his" voice over "mine." And, in contrast to the
neat linear process dictated by method, I wrote what is now the second
chapter first. Although that's not quite right because I found that I
had to write parts of what is now the first chapter before I could
finish the second. And so on.
And where does rewriting begin and end? As I write these words,
the manuscript has already been reviewed and accepted for publication.
That is, these words were not in the draft that its reviewers approved.
They are here now because I've been asked to give more examples,
in a revised version of the manuscript, of how deconstructive insights
affect our thinking about writing pedagogy. And if the editors don't
approve them when they do their rewriting of the manuscript, these
words will be edited out and no other readers will ever read them.
Certainly the reviewer who suggested such changes took part in the
revision process. Other revisions will occur, of course, when readers
rewrite the text after it is published, in reviews and, most likely, in
letters addressed to me.
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Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
41
Genre Alert!
Traditional composition pedagogy is often organized along generic
lines. Its textbooks devote chapters to the "expository essay," the "essay
of comparison and contrast," the "persuasive essay," and the like.
These and other conventional generic distinctions imply that certain
formulaic constraints, embedded within a text, display the mode of
thought or the kind of intention held by the writer. But the deconstructive critique of the nature of textuality disrupts a good deal of
the traditional pedagogical thought that would channel the flow of
the writing process into discreet generic categories, or would divide
writing instruction itself into units, sections, or parts, "assignments;'
"themes," and "papers."
On the deconstructive account (and in process pedagogy as well)
writing is conceived as continuous and dynamic. For pragmatic reasons,
readers and writers entertain the illusion that the flow of writing is
halted by its being stapled or paper-clipped and placed inside a plastic
folder purchased from the bookstore. But this illusion of closure is
only a convenient fiction. In keeping with its general suspicion of the
imposition of limits on the movement of writing, then, the deconstructive critique of textuality also problematizes traditional use of generic
categories.
Traditional composition teachers borrowed their list of generic
categories from an eighteenth-century rhetorical theory that centralized
the notion of authors' intentions. In this theory, genres such as
"exposition" were thought to be discriminable from others such as
"persuasion" or "expression" by means of the enshrinement within
them of their authors' "aims!' According to George Campbell, whose
Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) is an important progenitor of this tradition,
such aims include enlightening the understanding, pleasing the imagination, moving the passions, or influencing the will. The text writers
who borrowed Campbell's classifiction of "aims" soon began to associate each of them with a discriminate genre of discourse. That is,
expository discourse appealed to the understanding, while narration
and description appealed to the imagination, poetry inflamed the
passions, and persuasive discourse influenced the will. Thus the
metaphysical rhetorical theory that was spawned by Campbell's work
supposed that the structure of a completed text could somehow
graphically re-present its author's intention.
But, as we have seen, the notion of intention is a metaphysical
fiction (this may be true of the notion of genre as well)? While generic
distinctions are useful to readers, since they may (or may not) announce
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A Teacher's introduction to Deconstruction
42
a text's lineage (the texts claimed as progenitors), they apparently do
not entirely constrain the writing process as it occurs. When professional
writers write, they ordinarily do not begin with generic constraints in
mind. Often they do not know what sort of piece will result from
their work; sometimes they are unsure even whether it will become
prose or poetry.
And when an experienced writer is asked to write within a prescribed
genre, such as a book review, she does not necessarily consult a
conventional format that is prescribed for such pieces, although she
may wish to do so in order to insure that hex readers get all the kinds
of commentary that they have learned to expect from such pieces of
writing. During composition, however, she also considers her responses
to the work in question, as well as the probable response of the
audience for the review, and the context (journal or periodical) in
which the review is to appear. If she is acquainted with the author,
as often happens, she also considers that person's probable response
to her review, and so on. She struggles to balance all of these constraints
within the writing process, availing herself of whatever linguistic
resources become apparent to her while she writes.
Thus, to insist that students begin the writing process within the
conventions prescribed for them by mandated genres, such as exposition, is to simplify the nature of the writing process as professionals
use it. It also denies the locatedness in place and time that characterizes
rhetorical situations, insofar as students are encouraged to think of
the generic classifications as more or less universally useful responses
to any writing task. Further, it forecloses the possibility, at least within
the scene of the classroom, that whatever the student is working on
at the moment may turn itself into a poem, a letter home, a script, or
an essay whose format does not appear in a textbook classification.
To put this in deconstructive terms, genre-based pedagogy places
restrictive boundaries on the movement of differance.
A deconstructive analytic also severely problematizes the status of
some of the genres that are nearest and dearest to traditional pedagogy.
For example, it compromises the traditional assumption that some
writing (or all of it during early stages of composing) is "personal" or
"expressive:' Rather, all writing is done in order to be read eventually,
even when it takes the form of notes or freewriting. The absence of
an other, an audience, is precisely what motivates writing in the first
place, even when that other is some imagined future version of one's
"self," as in the case of notes jotted down for future reference. Too,
58
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
43
this "future self" will be different from the "present self" because of
its necessary immersion within the flow of differance.
If a deconstructive attitude problematizes the notion of the "personal
essay," it poses nearly insuperable difficulties for the notion of "expository writing." Most of us who teach writing in American educational
institutions work with courses or programs that utilize the term
"expository writing." Exposition is a relatively new genre within the
rhetorical tradition, having been invented in the late eighteenth century
as an efficient generic means of conveying the results of scientific
investigation to interested others. The "exposition" entailed in the term
does not refer, of course, to writers' exposing their "thoughts," or
"selves," as they are supposed to do in personal essays. No, it is some
"subject" that is to be exposed (or, in a strange metaphoric opposition,
"covered") by expository discourse. In the words of one of its early
twentieth-century proponents, expository discourse amounts to a "succinct and orderly setting-forth of some piece of knowledge" (Baldwin
1902, 40). And according to the authors of a popular late-nineteenthcentury textbook, a writer who undertakes the composition of expository discourse must "understand the subject under discussion better
than his readers do:' In exposition, "the writer's aim is to make others
see the meaning of some idea as clearly as he himself sees it" (Scott
and Denney 1909, 302).
Alexander Bain, who provided a powerful rationale for exposition
during the middle of the nineteenth century, gave a more inclusive
definition: for him, exposition was "the mode of handling applicable
to knowledge or information in the form of what is called the Sciences,"
which, he was confident, were "each laid out on the plan of exhausting,
in the most systematic array, alI the information, respecting one
department of nature" (1866, 147). Expository writing was to imitate
this exhaustivity. Each expository essay was to lay before its readers,
complete and entire, the writer's understanding of a given "subject."
If one accepts Derridean notions about writing, of course, "expository
writing" is not thinkable. From a deconstructive point of view, writing
does not "expose" much of anything, except perhaps itself. Nor can
it "cover" (either in the sense of cloaking or exhausting) so. te subject
that exists outside it. Derrida questions the ability of writing to represent
anything outside itself, as well as the notion that some transcendental
signi:zr can be foundmind, idea, soul, subject, knowledge, essence
which could authorize that representation. What precedes the act of
writing is more writing; all that follows upon it is more writing (or
59
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
44
reading). What writing does is extend itself, chain itself, into a series
of signifiers whose proliferation can only be halted during the writing
process by an act of will or sheer exhaustion.
Bain's project of systematizing and completing knowledge is the
very one that Derrida sets out to attack. Derrida reads the necessity
for logocentric cultures to think of knowledge as endosed or encap-
sulated within essays or books as a grasp for totality, for closure,
finally, for control; every writer wants to "have the last word!' Again
I quote Derrida (which in itself is sometimes an illuminating exercise
in the inability of writing to expose anything):
Good writing has therefore always been comprehended. ... within
a totality, and enveloped in a volume or a book. The idea of the
book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this
totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality
constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions
and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. (0G, 18)
In other words (Richard Rrnty's), Derrida wants to demolish the notion
of
'the book'the notion of a piece of writing as aimed at accurate
treatment of a subject, conveying a message which (in more fortunate circumstances) might have been conveyed by ostensive definition or by injecting knowledge straight into the brain. (1978, 146)
This goes equally well for the notions of "papers" and "themes," of
course, which, on Derrida's model, cannot be construed as "containers"
for some bit of "knowledge."
Expository writing, in its desire for transparency, completeness, and
closure, participates in the Western metaphysical tradition in an almost
ideal way; perhaps i. is not too much of an exaggeration to say that
exposition is the genre, par excellence, which secures the metaphysics
of presence within the center of academic discourse. Vincent Leitch
has remarked that the structure of any logocentric system "insures
balance, coherence, and organization, all deployed around a controlled
point;' which is as nice a description of the five - hundred -word theme
as will be found anywhere outside the textbook tradition (1983, 36).
If Dertida's insights are worth entertaining, we writing teachers must
consider an alternate possibility: to insist that our students compose
balanced, coherent, and organized pieces of discourse is to hide a
deception, a deception which radically misunderstands the nature of
writing.
If traditional classes in "expository writing" play a bad joke on all
of us, students are the most obvious butt of the joke. The tasks set
v
6 .4
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
45
for students in such a course are simply not possible to accomplish.
First of all assignments in exposition, if taken seriously, place students
in the position of imitating writers who have devoted their careers to
becoming expert in some field of inquiry. Such assignments, at the
very least, trivialize the difficult process of acquiring scientific knowledge. But even more seriously, such assignments ask young people to
learn to manage the terms and conventions of the discourse which
surrounds a "subject.' in a very short time and without assistance.
Serious students try to work their way out of this dilemma by retreating
to the library in order to read up on abortion, the war between Iraq
and Iran, or whatnot. In Derridean terms, they try to enter into the
chain of signification that surrounds, and amounts to discourse about
their subjects.
Students have another alternative, of course. They may attempt to
fulfill an expository assignment by producing what Jasper Neel calls
"anti-writing," where they "generate infinite numbers of texts that
proclaim themselves as correct syntax, patterns of arrangement, and
categories such as exposition" (1988, 149). Neel argues that students
have learned that
they can avoid writing altogether by providing shells with no
interior spelling, punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, structure,
and coherence that are nothing but spelling, punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, structure and coherence. (165)
Faced by the enormity of trying to represent some "subject" in writing,
then, some students adopt a strategy of display. As Neel observes,
classes in expository writing "hardly ever generate any writing."
Instead, students' texts simply announce that their authors are observing the syntactic and organizational rules they have been taught
to follow. Anti-writing is a cynical version of the traditional Western
attitude toward writing: it is the outside of an outside, writing thoroughly technologized, pure ritual.
Deconstructive Pedagogy as a Positive Science
The performance of this "reading" of traditional pedagogy may be as
far as deconstruction will take us. I am not sure that a deconstructive
pedagogy can be realizedthe term is itself an oxymoron. Nevertheless,
I can guess about some things a deconstructive pedagogy might be up
to if it were thought of as a set of strategies for teaching.
First of all, it would reject the traditional model of authority that
obtains in most American classrooms, where the teacher is both
61
46
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
receptacle and translator of received knowledge" At the very least, a
deconstructive pedagogy would adopt the positions that knowledge is
a highly contextualized activity which is constructed within groups,
communities, or societies; that knowledge itself is a volatile construct,
subject to alteration when contexts for knowing are altered; and that
so-called "received" knowledge is just thatreceived. That is, the
knowledge which is preferred and privileged at any given moment is
so, simply because influential members of the concerned community
have subscribed to it. A teacher who was convinced of the force of
these assumptions would, no doubt, try to construct a classroom scene
where they were daily allowed to come into play.
For another thing, a deconstructive pedagogy would reinforce the
notion, as composition specialists would have it, that writing is a
process. But it would interpret this slogan more profoundly to mean
that the process that is writing is differentiation and not repetition of
the same. The writing process differs to some extent with every situation
or task; which also implies that no universally useful model or tactics
for generating writing will ever be found. (At the very least, if such
models exist, they exist in language, not minds, and are thus language-
specific.) This does not mean that the writing process cannot be
generalized about, of course. It simply means that writers must always
take into account the constraints of the rhetorical situation in which
they find themselves.
That writing is a process of differentiation also means that a syllabus
for a writing class would always be in revision, would always be
available for alteration as class members' writing changed the focus
of the class. A syllabus for a semester- or year-long writing course
that respects deconstructive attitudes toward writing would assume its
relevance to all other writing being done, and formerly done, by
teacher and students. No writing would be exempt from reading,
rewriting, in such a classpapers for other classes, childhood poetry,
the teacher's own work-in-progress. Nor would writing events that
occur in connection with such classes be perceived as unrelated to one
another. An "assignment" is writing by a teacher that calls for writing
by students, which in turn calls for more wrieng by the teacher and
so on and on. Freewritings, journals, essays, papers, are all part of a
differentiating process that they only seem to halt by being put down
on paper. They are all susceptible to revision, to incorporation into
other texts, whether those other texts are written by the same or
another or several writers at once. It may (should?) be that no "pieces"
of writing are ever completed in such a class. The feeling that a writer
62
47
Deconstructing Writing Pedagogy
can "finish" a piece of writing may simply disguise her exhaustion,
her inability to go on, her lack of resources like time or money.
In other words, a deconstructive pedagogy would devise ways to
engage students as active readersthat is, re-writers--of the teachers'
writingher course. It would encourage students to revise assignments
and syllabi, to reject an assigned text and choose new ones. Such
procedures would acknowledge the movement of differance, of writing,
as it is worked out in the relation between the writers and readers of
a text called "composition class." The changing relations that develop
between teacher and studentsand among studentsas the wilting
class evolves, would mimic the changing relations that occur between
words and sentences in a discourse as it is revised. Any readings that
were undertaken in connection with such a class, literary or not, would
also be seen as texts to be rewritten, to be incorporated into students'
wilting processes.
Further, a deconstructive pedagogy would treat the writing process
exactly as it occurs always and everywhere: it would be as fully
contextualized within the classroom as without. In composition class,
English teachers are the ultimate audience for writing, much as are
bosses, editors, and teachers of "content-area" classes. The traditional
notion that composition prepares students for wilting in the "real
world" pretends that classroom wilting is "practice" for some future
"real wilting." In other words, traditional assumptions always defer
"real" wilting, and this explains why so much student wilting is
unmotivated.
In a writing class governed by deconstructive attitudes, on the other
hand, teachers would sensitize their students to the institutional realities
in which they write, and they would treat the institutional situation
as a "real-world" one where students are expected to learn a special
brand of writingacademic discourse. And, since knowledge itself is
always in flux, and since preferred knowledge is always inscribed by
a culture in its institutions, students and teachers would examine the
institutional ideology that governs their work: why "academic discourse" is preferred in school to whatever discourse(s) the students
bring to school with them; why students might want to learn it (or
not); why teachers are invested with institutional authority; why they
are expected to give grades; how this constraint both interferes with,
and encourages, the wilting process.
In short, to adopt deconstructive attitudes toward writing and its
teaching will not be an easy matter for either students or teachers, all
of whom are accustomed TO working within the constraints placed on
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A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
them by institutions and a culture that subscribes to the metaphysics
of presence. Perhaps the best to be hoped for is that a deconstructive
critique demonstrates the necessity of continued interrogation of the
strategies used to teach reading and writing. I can only hope that this
essay has stimulated a few of its readers to engage in such a critique.
64
Appendix
How to Read Derrida
In her "Translator's Introduction" to Dissemination, Barbara Johnson
identifies some of Derrida's rhetorical strategies in "Plato's Pharmacy"
as follows: translation of a single word (wherein the Greek pharmakon
is played with as both "poison" and "remedy"); anagrammatical texture
(play with the etymology of a term); lateral association (which utilizes
other contexts in which a given word is used across Plato's canon).
Likewise, Derrida has also inscribed a set of themes of his own in this
work: webs, textiles, textures, pens and surfaces, fathers and sons,
sorcerers, magicians, and healers, and so on.
His realization that language is opaque, rather than transparent,
explains why Derrida's works are so difficult. He uses incessant and
extended punning, ellipsis, and self-reference to call attention to
language, its cheats and maneuverings. He often speaks in tongues.
Sometimes it is hard to tell whether one is reading Derrida, or whether
he has put on Rousseau'sor Aristotle's, or Freud'svoice in order
to speak through, around, and inside of that voice. In Glas (1974), his
commentary on Hegel and Jean Genet is presented in two columns
set side by side, so that they comment not only on their "subjects,"
but also on each other. They illustrate as well the illusion of "the
book"the illusion that books are stable containers of information
whose margins and endpapers mark the last word, the end of all that
can be said.
In short, it is best to approach Derrida's texts just as though they
were literary texts. Readers should be alert to the appearance and
reappearance of a favorite set of motifs, to Derrida's writing under
the cover of some other writer's voice, to elliptical or unusual syntax,
to coined terms or phrases, to play with the conventions of printing,
and to bilingual punning.
1 suggest that beginning readers of Derrida read together in groups
of three or four. Read his work in short stretches, and then meet to
discuss it. Since deconstruction is a strategy of reading, the real
usefulness of reading together is established during the reading group's
49
65
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
50
discussion, which is in itself a strategy of reading. Members of a group
can also help each other to establish a glossary of Derridean terminology, voices, and motifs.
Perhaps I only think it best to begin with Of Grammatology since
that is where my colleagues and I (Jay Farness, Jim Fitzmaurice, and
Bryan Short) began to read Derrida. But the Grammatology, it still seems
to me, offers Derrida's most sustained deconstruction of metaphysical
notions about writing, arid, as such, is central to the work of English
teachers. Its translator's preface, written by Gayatri Spivak, is a succinct
and lucid introduction to Derrida's work, and is very helpful to new
readers who wish to locate Derrida within the philosophical tradition
he is trying to deconstruct. (Don't be put off by the wealth of allusions
in the introduction.)
But new readers might also start with the essays collected in Writing
and Difference, especially those on Freud, Edmond Jabes, and Emmanuel
Levinas. These essays are valuable less as commentary on individual
writers than as early introductions to some of Derrida's pivotal notions:
the composing process (which he calls "the scene of writing"), the
question of the book, and the violence of the letter. This collection
also contains his seminal deconstruction of structuralism: "Structure,
Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
Really fervent readers might then want to move on to Margins of
Philosophy; which reprints a number of essays of particular interest to
English teachers, especially "Signature, Event, Context," which deconstructs the notion of written language as communication, and "White
Mythology," a deconstruction of the Western notion of metaphor which
centers on Aristotle's treatment of this figure in the Rhetoric and Poetics.
I think that Derrida's most beautiful work, to date, is Dissemination,
which includes an essay on Plato's Phaedrus, and an essay on the
literary critical notion of mimesis. Barbara Johnson's translator's introduction to this work is very good, and helpful to newer readers of
Derrida.
Readers who master these works should have an excellent understanding of Derrida and deconstruction. Those who wish to begin
reading the texts which influenced Derrida's thought will find a handy
collection in Mark C. Taylor's Deconstruction in Context; this work
includes relevant readings from Kant, Hegel, Saussure, Nietzsche,
Heidegger Blanchot and others.
6G
Notes
Chapter 1
1. Deconstruction thus validates the hermeneutic notion that archaic texts
can never be read by modem readers exactly as they were interpreted by
their first readers. For background on hermeneutic interpretation, see HansGeorge Gadarner's Truth and Method (1985) and the final section of Richard
Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).
2. I am indebted to Janet Emig for this wonderful term.
3. In A Preface to Literacy (1987), Myron Tuman argues that some stretches
of written language must appear within an immediate context in order to be
meaningful at all He gives the following example: "Meet me here at this
time tomorrow with a stick this long" (15-16). I would argue, however, that
even if this message were washed up on shore in a bottle, the finder would
strive to construct a context for it that would inscribe it with some meaning
would imagine a sender, and an audience for it, in fact, as I immediately did
when I read it, even situated as it was "inside" the covers of Tuman's book.
4. (OG, 81). A respected and accessible interpreter of the history of writing
is lgnace Gelb, whose A Study of Writing (1952) was long the authoritative
work on the subject in English. For more recent studies that take Derrida's
insights into account, see Geoffrey Sampson, Writing Systems (1985) and Roy
Harris, The Origin of Writing (1986). For a study of how ancient scripts are
deciphered, see Maurice Pope, The Story of Archeological Decipherment (1975).
See also Derrida on Condillac (Archeology of the Frivolous) and Warburton
("Scribble").
Chapter 2
1. "Post-structuralism" was once a term that applied to any systematic
critique of a methodology called "structuralism," During the mid-twentieth
century, structuralist thought was prominent in linguistics, anthropology,
psychology, philosophy, and literary criticism. Structuralists assume that
(presumably universal) laws, or structures of laws, govern human activity and
that these laws can be ferreted out by determined investigation of human
systems such as language or kinship. Given Derrida's critiques of the work
of two premiere structuralists, Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss,
deconstruction is, if not preeminent among post-structuralisms, certainly a
forceful division of poststructural thought. The term "post-structuralism"
subsequently evolved into a designation that could be used for any theory or
methodology which offered a critique of modernist notions such as the
sovereign self. In this guise "post-structuralism" is equivalent to "post51
6
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
52
modernism." See Michael Lane's "Introduction" in his Introduction to Structuralism (1970) for a lucid description of structuralism; another good collection
of structuralist texts can be found in De George and De George, The Structuralists: From Marx to Urn-Strauss (1972). For an account of the relation of
structuralism to literary criticism and its development into post-structuralism,
see John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: Lkvi-Strauss to Derrida (1979).
2. (1982, 37). In Marxism and Deconstruction, Ryan demonstrates conclusively that Derridean deconstruction has a political agenda. That it also has
ramifications for pedagogy has been demonstrated in a number of works.
Among those not mentioned elsewhere in this essay are G. Douglas Atkins's
and Michael Johnson's Writing and Reading Differently: Deconstruction and the
Teaching of Composition and Literature (1985) and Barbara Johnson's The
Pedagogical Imperative (1981).
3. Those who undertake to criticize deconstruction often don't take the
time to read Derrida's (admittedly difficult) texts, relying instead for their
assessment of deconstruction on the literary criticism produced by the Yale
critics, or on books about Derrida. And those who do, and who recognize
the threat that deconstruction poses to institutionalized literary criticism and
traditional definitions of English studies, often choose to misunderstand its
implications. For example, in Does Deconstruction Make Any Difference? (1987),
Michael Fischer argues that Derrida has no right to complain about misreadings
of his texts, since a deconstructive viewpoint mandates the equivocality of all
texts (40ff). That texts are susceptible to multiple interpretations does not
entail that all readings are good readings, or that texts cannot be read at all.
4. I am aware that my casual use of the terms "theory" and "practice"
overlooks the controversy over the relevance of theory to anything at all. To
call new criticism a "theory of textuality" is to make no more claims for it
than to say that it offers a coherent description of how an ideal ,axt ought to
look. For a polemic examination of the problem of the status of theory, see
W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism
(1985), especially the contribution by Stanley Fish entitled "Consequences."
5. The theory of textuality advanced by currenttraditional rhetoric has all
sorts of ideological implications that we are only now beginning to understand.
At the very least, it reinforces the Iogocentric authority ascribed to science.
For an introduction to current-traditional rhetoric and its ideological implications, see James A. Berlin, Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American
(1984). For examinations of the ideological implications of process
pedagogy, see Greg Myers, "Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric
of ComposiCon Teaching" (1986) and Myron C. Taman, "Class, Codes, and
Composition; Basil Bernstein and the Critique of Pedagogy" (1988).
Colleges
Chapter 3
1. I am engaging in nothing so ambitious here as a critique of traditional
pedagogy, when "critique" is defined as it is by Barbara Johnson: "A critique
of any theoretical system ... is an analysis that focuses on the grounds of
that system's possibility. The critique reads backwards from what seems
natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things
have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on
68
Notes
53
what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a natural given
but a cultural construct, usually blind to itself (Dis, xv). It may well be the
case that I shift away from deconstructive analysis in the latter portion of this
essay, toward a hermeneutic interpretation of writing pedagogy
2. For historical examinations of the authority invested in authorship during
the modern era, see Timothy Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (1982), and
Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (1979). For a readable explication of
post-modern critiques of the sovereign self, written by a philosopher, see
Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (1980).
3. Spivak explicitly connects masculine and feminine roles with those of
writer and reader, respectively. Indeed the phallic overtones of the very act
of writing, which begins with pen (instrument, tool) inscribing paper (space,
potentially fertile ground), are obvious enough. Derrida has also exploited
the sexual imagery associated with the writing process. See "The Question
of Style" (1977). Nor has the appropriateness of sexual imagery for the
rhetorical process escaped rhetoricians: see Wayne Brockriede's "Arguers as
Lovers" (1972).
4. See Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami, Writing in Non-Academic Settings
(1985), especially Paul V. Anderson, "What Survey Research Tells Us about
Writing at Work" (50-51).
5. The "ideal text" posited by traditional composition pedagogy constitutes
an interesting elevation of form over content, thus reversing the traditional
metaphysical hierarchy. I suspect that this came about for institutional as well
as politica! reasons. Teachers of composition have always been overworked;
if they could reduce their commentary on student papers to formulaic
considerations, ignoring "content;' they expedited the work of grading papers.
The notion that teachers ought to be neutral in their response to students'
arguments also protects teachers (and the institutions they represent) from
having to take positions within the social or political discourse which is carried
on in the culture surrounding the academy.
6. (Dis, 36-37). In good disseminatory fashion, I am paraphrasing Derrida,
who, in a footnote to "Outwork;' is quoting a "reply" made by Descartes to
his critics.
7. For an examination of the problem of genre, see Derrida's "The Law 1
Genre," as well as the rest of the essays collected in Glyph 7 (1980).
8. For explications of the historical and political reasoning that makes this
move necessary, see Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology (1985, 157-72);
and Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, chapter 7, "Reason and Counterrevolution." I realize that many of the suggestions I make here are subversive
of institutionalized writing instruction. Since schools are a mainstay of logocentrism, the adoption of deconstructive attitudes toward institutional pedagogies is necessarily a subversive act. For a brilliant critique of the thoroughness
with which educational institutions and their students have absorbed the
metaphysics of presence, see Jasper Neel, Plato, Derrida, Writing (1988).
Glossary
To define terms is to commit a metaphysical act, since definitions assume that
limits can be drawn around meanings. However, the editors at NCTE : =fisted
that definitions of a few key terms would make this text more accessible to
its readers. I bow to their wishes and provide this brief glossary. Readers are
forewarned, however, that the definitions listed here are simplifications of
enormously complex terms that cannot be easily understood outside of the
historical context in which Derrida and others employ them.
Arche-writing: Derrida's term for human consciousness or being. The terms
"consciousness" and "being" are integral to the metaphysics of presence.
Derrida uses the term "writing" to underscore the fact that consciousness
itself is made possible by the signing function of language. Arche-writing
is sometimes a synonym (if such things exist) for "difference."
Difference: A pun in French, combining the meanings of the English terms
"difference" and "deferring." Difference then alludes to (1) the tendency
of meaning to inhere in items which differ from one another, and (2) the
tendency of language to always put off, or preclude, the discovery of any
final or authoritative interpretation of itself. In a larger sense, difference
characterizes the movement of human consciousness and knowledge.
Erasure Derrida employs the French phrase "sous rature" (under erastre)
when he wishes to interrogate the ordinary or casual use of crucial cultural
terms, such as "self" or "being" He sometimes indicates that a term has
been placed under erasure by writing a large "X" across its face. Thus the
term is still present (we can still see it on the page), but its ordinary uses
have been put into question, or "erased" at the same time. This little
graphic project is only one means by which Derrida indicates the difficulty
inherent in any radical re-thinking of the metaphysics of presence, or in
erasing the cultural effects of any of its crucial terms; it also reminds readers
of the "absence" or "trace" that resides at tte origin of human writing.
Inscription: Literally, writing on a page; impos;... one's mark upon a surface.
More generally, inscription refers to human impact on an environment
inscription occurs by means of dance, sex, speech, photography, architecture,
politicsany human sphere tnat can be demarcated or delineated.
Metaphysics of Presence: The set of assumptions about mind, language, and
being which has characterized Western philosophy since Plato (see chapter 1).
Occulting: "Hiding" or "forgetting" a term and its uses. Usually terms that
are occulted are part of a binary dichotomy. The preference for the privileged
term in the pairing blots out cultural awareness of its (nevertheless
necessary) partner. Within the metaphysics of presence, the second term
55
70
56
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
in each of the following pairs has occasionally or always been "occulted":
male/female, speaking/writing, thought/language.
Supplementation: "Substitution" is not a synonym for supplementation, since
the latter term also signifies a dual process of filling up a space which was
not completely occupied, as well as expanding that space to make room
for new supplements. Supplementation thus names one movement of
differance. The notions of supplementation and difference, in fact, problematize the assumption that synonymsnames which exactly substitute
for other namescan be found in language at all. Roget's Thesaurus
provides a splendid example of the supplementary movement of language,
insofar as its lists of supposedly similar terms actually demonstrate how
words differ from one another, proliferating new shades of meaning in the
process.
7/
Bibliography
In citing works in the text, notes, and bibliography, short titles have been
used to refer to frequently cited works by Derrida. These works are identified
by the following abbreviations:
Dis
MP
OG
WD
Dissemination (1981)
The Margins of Philosophy (1982)
Of Grammatology (1976)
Writing and Difference (1975)
List of Works Cited
Abrams, M. H. "The Limits of Pluralism: Deconstructive Anger Critical
Inquiry 3 (1977): 425-38.
Atkins, G. Douglas and Michael Johnson, eds. Writing and Reading Differently:
Deconstruction and the Teaching of Composition and Literature. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1985.
Bain, Alexander. English Composition and Rhetoric. London: Longmans, 1866.
Baldwin, Charles S. A College Manual of Rhetoric. New York: Longmans, 1902.
Berlin, James A. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Brockriede, Wayne. "Arguers as Lovers." Colorado Journal of Educational
Research 2 (1972): 3-7.
Cain, William E. The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature, and Reform in
English Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Campbell, George. The Philosophy of Rhetoric. Edited by Lloyd E Bitzer.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963.
Covino, William. "Making Differences in the Composition Class: A Philosophy
of Invention!' Freshman English News 10 (1981): 1-13.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
DeGeorge, Richard T. and Femande M. DeGeorge, eds. The Structit:alists:
From Marx to Levi-Strauss. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1971.
Derrida, Jacques. Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1980.
--. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981.
57
72
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
58
. Glen. Traslatee by Jean P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Tress, 1986.
. "La Loi du genre/The Law of Genre." In Glyph 7, 176-229. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
.The Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982.
O f Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981.
"The Question of Style." In The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles
of Interpretation, edited by David Killion, 176-89. New York: Delta, 1977.
. "Scribble (writing-power)." Translated by Cary Plotkin. Yale French
Studies 58 (1979): 116-47.
"Signature, Event, Context." In Glyph 1, 172-97. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977. (Reprinted in The Margins of Philosopiay.)
. "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." In Philosophy in France Today,
edited by Alan Montefiore, 34-50. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
The White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy. Hew
Literary History 6 (1974): 7 -74. (Reprinted in Margins.)
Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1975.
Descombes, Vincent. Modern French Philosophy. Translated by L. Scott-Fox
and J. M. Harding. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin: Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London:
Verso, 1981.
Fischer, Michael. Does Deconstruction Make Any Difference? Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in
Post-Structural Criticism, edited by Josue V. Harari, 141-60. London: Methuen and Company, 1979.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad Publishing
Company, 1985.
Gelb, lgnace J. A Study of Writing. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1952.
Harried, Jon. "Post-structuralism and the Teaching of Composition." Freshman
English News 15 (1986): 10-16.
Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. London: Duckworth, 1986.
Johnson, Barbara, ed. The Pedagogical Imperative. Yale French Studies (63),
1981.
Knoblauch, C. H. and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of
Writing. Montclair, N.J.: Boynton-Cook Publishers, 1984,
Krieger, Murray. "The Recent Revolution in Theory and the Survival of the
Literary Discourses." In The State of the Discipline, 1970's-1980's, edited by
Jasper Neel, 27-34. ;Special Issue of the ADE Bulletin 62 (1979): 27-34.)
73
Bibliography
59
Lane, Michael, ed. Introduction to Structuralism. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Leitch, Vincent. "Deconstruction and Pedagogy" In Atkins and Johnson,
16-26.
. Deconstruct:ve Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1983.
McCormick, Kathleen, Gary Waller, and Linda Flower. Reading Texts: Reading,
Responding, Writing. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1987.
Mitchell, W. J. T., ed. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Miller, J. Hillis. "The Critic as Host." Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 439-47. Revised
and reprinted in Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Geoffrey Hartman,
217-53.
. "Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching
of Writing." In Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap, edited by
Winifred Bryan Homer, 38-56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Miller, Susan. "Is There a Text in This Class?" Freshman English News 11
(1982): 20-23.
Myers, Greg. "Reality, Consensus, and Reform in the Rhetoric of Composition
Teaching:' College English 48 (1986): 154-74.
Neel, Jasper. Plato, Derrida, Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1988.
Norris, Christopher. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London: Methuen,
1982.
North, Stephen. The Making of Knowledge in Composition. Montclair, N.J.:
Boynton-Cook, 1987.
Odell, Lee and Dixie Goswami, eds. Writing in Non-Academic Settings. New
York: The Guilford Press, 1985.
Plato. "The Phaedrus." In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith
Hamilton and Hamilton Cairns, 475-525. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963.
Pope, Maurice. The Story of Archeological Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Linear B. New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1975.
Reiss, Timothy. The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1982.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1979.
--, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing." New Literary %story 10 (1978):
141-61.
Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Sampson, Geoffrey. Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction. London: Hutch-
inson, 1985.
Scholes, Robert. "Deconstruction and Criticism." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988):
278-95.
Scholes, Robert, Nancy Comley, and Gregory Ulmer. Text Book. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1988.
74
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
60
Scott, Fred Newton and Joseph Villiers Denney. Paragraph-Writing: A Rhetoric
for Colleges. New ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, [1893] 1909.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model:
Derrida's 'Limited Inc. " Diacritics 10 (1980): 29-49.
"Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle." Diacritics 14 (1984): 19-36.
Sturrock, John C., ed. Structuralism and Since: Levi-Strauss to Derrida. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979.
Taylor, Mark C., ed. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Tuman, Myron C. "Class, Codes, and Composition: Basil Bernstein and the
Critique of Pedagogy." College Composition and Communication 39 (1988):
42-51.
. A Preface to Literacy: An Enquiry into Pedagogy, Practice, and Progress.
University, Alabama: Alabama University Press, 1987.
Ulmer, Gregory. Applied Grammatology: Post(e)- Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida
to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Warnock, Tilly. "How I Write." In Writers on Writing, edited by Tom Waldrep,
305-15. New York: Random House, 1985.
White, Edward M. "Post-Structural Literary Criticism and the Response to
Student Writing." College Composition and Communication 35 (1984) :186 -195.
Winterowd, W. Ross. "Post-structuralism and Composition," Pre/Text 4 (1983):
85-95.
. "The Purification of Literature and Rhetoric." College English 49 (1987):
257-73.
Some Works by Derrida Not Cited in the Text
"The Conflict of Faculties ?' In Languages of Knowledge and Languages of
Knowledge and of Inquiry, edited by Michael Riffaterre. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982. (On Kant and authority.)
The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Edited by Christie
V. McDonald and translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken Books,
1985. (Interviews and discussions.)
"Economimesis: Diacritics 11 (1981): 3-25. (On Kant.)
Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry. Translated by Edward Leavey. Stonybrook: Hays, 1978.
"Limited Inc. abc." In Glyph 2,162-254. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978. (A reply to John Searle, who had attacked Derrida's reading
of J. L. Austin in "Signature, Event, Context.")
"Living OnBorder Lines." In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Geoffrey
Hartman, 75-176. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. (On Shelley
ostensibly.)
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
"L'Age de Hegel!' In Qui a Peur de la Philosophie?, 73-107. Paris: Flammarion,
1977. (Writing with members of GREPH [Groupe de Recherches sur
l'Enseignement Philosophique].) (On teaching.)
75
Bibliography
61
Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Translated
by David Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1979.
The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
On Derrida and Deconstruction
Arac, Jonathan, and others. The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Atkins, G. Douglas. Reading Deconstruction: Deconstructive Reading. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1983.
Butler, Christopher. Interpretation, Deconstruction, and Ideology: An Introduction
to Some Current Issues in Literary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Cain, William E. "Deconstruction in America: The Recent Literary Criticism
of J. Hillis Miller." College English 41 (1979): 367-82.
Cascardi, A. J. "Skepticism and Deconstruction." Philosophy and Literature 8
(1984): 1-14.
Crowley, Sharon. "Of Gorgias and Grammatology." College Composition and
Communication 30 (1979): 279-84.
" Post-structuralism and Composition!' Pre/Text 5 (1984): 185-95.
. "writing and Writing." In Atkins and Johnson, 93-100.
de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983.
Felperin, Howard. Beyond Deconstruction: The Uses and Abuses of Literary
Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
ierguson, Frances. "Reading Heidegger: Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man!'
Boundary 2 (1976): 593-610.
Foley, Barbara. "The Politics of Deconstruction." In Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale, edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schliefer, 113-34.
Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.
Fynsk, Chistopher. "A Decelebration of Philosophy." Diacritics 8 (1978):
80-90.
Gasche, Rodolphe. "Deconstruction as Criticism," In Glyph 6, 177-216. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
Goodheart, Eugene. The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Hartman, Geoffrey. "How Creative Should Literary Criticism Be?" New York
Times Book Review (5 April 1981): 11,24-5.
S aving the Text: Literature/Philosophy/Derrida. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.
Harvey, Irene. Derrida and the Economy of Differance. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986.
76
A Teacher's Introduction to Deconstruction
62
Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric
of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.
Kaufer, David and Gary Waller. "To Write is to Read Is to Write, Right?" In
Atkins and Johnson, 66-92.
Krupnick, Mark. Displacement: Derrida and After. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Leitch, Vincent B. "The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J.
Hillis Miller!' Critical Inquiry 6 (1980): 593-607.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980.
Lewis, Philip. "The Post-structuralist Condition." Diacritics 12 (1982): 1-24.
McDonald, Christie. "Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau!' The Eighteenth
Century 20 (1970): 82-95.
Miller, J. Hillis. "Ariadne's Broken Woof:' Georgia Review 31 (1977): 44-60.
"Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line." Critical Inquiry
3 (1976): 57-78.
"The Search for Grounds in Literary Study" Genre 17 (1984): 19-36.
"Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure Georgia Review 30 (1976):
5-33.
Norris, Christopher. The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after
Deconstruction. New York: Methuen, 1985.
Rand, Richard. "Geraldine." In Glyph 3, 74-97. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1978.
Ray, William. Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1984.
Rorty, Richard. "Deconstruction and Circumvention!' Critical Inquiry 11(1984):
1-23.
Searle, John. "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida." In Glyph 1,
198-208. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Scholes, Robert. Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Spivak, Gayatri. "Reading the World: Literary Studies in the 1980's." College
English 43 (1981): 671-79.
Young, Robert, ed. Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader. London:
Rout ledge and Kegan Paul, 1981.
Some Exemplary Deconstructive Readings
Atkins, G. Douglas. Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
Chase, Cynthia. "The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel
Deronda." PMLA 93 (1978): 215-27.
Flores, Anthony. The Rhetoric of Doubtful Authority: Deconstructive Readings of
Self-Questioning Narratives, St. Augustine to Faulkner; Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1984.
7
63
Bibliography
Jacobs, Carol. "The (Too) Good Soldier: 'A Real Story.' " In Glyph 3, 32-51.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982.
Ryan, Michael. "The Question of Autobiography in Cardinal Newman's
Apologia pro vita sua." Georgia Review 31 (1977): 672-99.
Spivak, Gayatri. "Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to
Thirteen." Texas Studies in Language and Literature 23 (1981): 324-60.
Sussman, Henry. Franz Kafka: Geometrician of Metaphor. Madison: Coda Press,
1979.
"The Deconstructionist as Politician: Melville's The Confidence Man."
In Glyph 4,32-56. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
78
Author
Sharon Crowley is professor of English
at Northern Arizona University. She has
taught high school English and has served
as editor of the Arizona English Bulletin
and director of NCTE's Commission on
Composition. Professor Crowley has
published widely on rhetoric and composition theory and the history of rhetoric
and composition studies.
79
63
NCTE Teacher's Introduction Series
Most of us would be grateful for assistance in getting the gist of a
philosophical position that for at least a decade has been central to
discussion's of literature and that, by laws as inexorable as those of
plate tectonics, will influence the teaching of English for decades to
come. Crowley's explanation of deconstruction . . . is reliable, balanced,
and accessible to readers with little background in the underlying
epistemological and linguistic issues.
(From the "Introduction" by W. Ross Winterowd)
4.
4